Terrorism

The other 9/11.

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Today we mourn the loss of thousands of lives in a terrorist attack on 9/11, 2001.

There was another 9/11 attack in 2012. It was three months before the 2012 presidential election and the implications of this were obvious.

A recent movie documented some of the lies about that event.

Despite Obama’s and Clinton’s recurring lies to the contrary, the deadly attacks of September 11, 2012, on U.S. diplomatic and intelligence facilities in Benghazi, Libya, had no connection with political protests. In director Michael Bay’s political-action thriller, which Paramount Pictures calls “a true story,” these two outposts get slammed ferociously by growing waves of well-armed jihadists who know exactly what they are doing. As if mocking Obama’s and Clinton’s lies, they do not drop their picket signs and then suddenly grab grenades, rocket launchers, and mortar shells. Instead, these killers skip the placards and head straight for the firepower.

We actually know quite a bit about how that event came to pass.

It began as “Operation Zero Footprint.”

We know Operation Zero Footprint was the covert transfer of weapons from the U.S to the Libyan “rebels”. We also know the operation avoided the concerns with congressional funding, and potential for public scrutiny, through financing by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

We also know that officials within the government of Qatar served as the intermediaries for the actual transfer of the weapons, thereby removing the footprint of the U.S. intervention.

We know the entire operation was coordinated and controlled by the State Department and CIA. We also know (from the Senate Foreign Relations Benghazi hearings) that “Zero Footprint” was unknown to the 2011 Pentagon and/or DoD commanders who would have been tasked with any military response to the 9/11/12 attack namely AFRICOM General Carter Ham.

However, it would be implausible to think that then Defense Secretary Bob Gates or Joint Chiefs Chair Admiral McMullen were completely unaware of the operation. Even today, despite the numerous hearings and reports, this aspect remains murky.

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9/11 Plus Seventeen Years

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I guess I thought they were all gone, those types of monsters, stranded on reels of black and white film.—Cara Ellison  (blog no longer available), in a 2007 post about 9/11/01.

Bookworm:  “My life is divided into two parts:    Before  September 11, 2001 and  after  September 11, 2001.”

Simply evil: Christopher Hitchens suggests that sometimes the simple and obvious explanation for an event is more accurate than an explanation which relies on an elaborate structure of “nuance”

An attack, not a disaster or a tragedy. George Savage explains why the persistent use of terms like “tragedy” by the media acts to obfuscate the true nature of the 9/11 attacks.

Claire Berlinski  was in Paris on 9/11. Shortly thereafter she wrote  this piece for City Journal

Marc Sasseville and Heather Penney  were F-16 pilots with an Air National Guard squadron. Their order was to bring down Flight 93 before the terrorists in control of it could create another disaster on the scale of the World Trade Center…but their aircraft were configured for training, with no live ammunition and no missiles. A video interview with Major Penney  here

Joseph Fouché  writes about how the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, and the murder of Ahmed Shah Masood on September 9 of that year, prefigured the 9/11 attacks.

The Diplomad  posts a speech he gave on 9/14/01, when he was charge d’affaires at a U.S. embassy.  You did not hear speeches like that being given by diplomats under the administration of Barack Obama.

On September 11, 2005,  Rare Kate  didn’t go to church. Follow the link to find out why. In my original post linking this, I said “What if American and British religious leaders had responded the depradations of  Naziism  in the spirit of this liturgy?  Actually, some of them did. The impact on preparedness was certainly malign, and the people who took such positions certainly bear a share of moral resposibility for the deaths and devastation that took place. Ditto for those who are behaving in a similar way today.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an important leader of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany (executed in 1945), wrote the following:

Today there are once more saints and villains. Instead of the uniform grayness of the rainy day, we have the black storm cloud and the brilliant lightning flash. Outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Shakespeare’s characters walk among us. The villain and the saint emerge from primeval depths and by their appearannce they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had never dreamed.

The refusal on the part of many individuals to face the seriousness of the radical Islamist threat to out civilization stems in significant part, I feel certain, from a desire to avoid the uncomfortable and even dangerous kind of clarity that Bonhoeffer was talking about.

In previous posts I’ve introduced the metaphor of the  attrition milla machine in which two steel disks, rotating at high speed in opposite directions, crush between them the grain or other substance to be milled. Our society is caught in a gigantic attrition mill, with one disk being the Islamic terrorist enemy and the other being the “progressive” Left within our own societiessome of whom are wishful thinkers who deny uncomfortable realities, an alarming number of whom forthrightly despise their own societies and the majority of their fellow citizens. Without the existence of the second disk, the terrorist threat would be serious, inconvenient, and dangerous, but would not be an existential threat to Western civilization. But it is the interaction of the two disks, despite the differences in their stated philosophies of life, that increases the societal threat by orders of magnitude.

Monica Crowley digs up an article written on September 19, 2001, by an Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama…and analyzes what it tells us about this man’s worldview and lack of intellectual depth.

Enid and Geraint…a poem written by Grim on 9/11/2001

Three Days in September, by Sarah Hoyt

A time bomb from the Middle Ages. Roger Simon explains how 9/11 altered his worldview and many of his relationships.

 

 

 

Po nan Jwèt la: Asymétri Kache nan Lavi Chak Jou

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Taleb, Nassim N., Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. New York City: Random House, 2018.

NB: precisely because I regard Taleb as a national treasure and have considerable respect for his work, I am not going to pull punches here. I get to do this because I have … skin in the game, and not only in Haiti[1] (where I wrote this post over the past ten days, thus the Kreyòl Ayisyen title), but in a couple-three moderately hair-raising situations back in KC, which I will relate when appropriate. Which might be never; see Matthew 6:1-4 (cited by Taleb on page 186).

Getting this out of the way—buy this book, read it, and recommend it to others. I say this very much irrespective of what might be called the Manifold-Taleb delta, which is not altogether trivial, as I will explain in some detail—again, as a sign of respect—below. Immediately below, in fact.

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Worthwhile Reading

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Cold Spring Shops:  Losing the Intellectual Tradition.  He cites Joy Pullman, who in turn quotes Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn:

We’re living in a time as if some blight has come across the earth. Something fantastic, something deep, something old, something elevated, something high is basically being obliterated.

Also from Cold Spring Shops:  Collaboration creates mediocrity.  I would rephrase this to say that collaboration can create mediocrity, especially when used as an unthinking buzzword and deployed as a pseudo-religion…after all, the purpose of basically all organizations is to allow people to collaborate, in various ways, to do what they could not do individually.  But shallow thoughts about collaboration and de-leveling and de-siloing and de-hierarchicalization are indeed in many cases detracting from the serious work that needs to be done on organizational design.

At Politico: The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.  See also a response to this story from The DiploMad.

Related, from Roger Simon:  Iran protests expose mainstream media as reationary, not liberal.

Three from Sarah Hoyt:

Childhood memories:  The things that stay

The importance of feedback:  Breaking the Gears

Of course they do:  When the Left bullies, they pose as anti-bullies

It looks like the “hero” security guard in the Vegas shooting is illegal.

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UPDATE: The hero guard has surfaced and will be on the Ellen Degeneres show.

He went for the money, which was sensible of him, but does anyone think he will be asked about his immigration status ?

The “hero” security guard in the Las Vegas shooting has not only disappeared, but had a false Social Security number.

I guess that’s why he bolted before the press conference.

He also may be the reason for the shifting stories about the shooting.

There are photos of him wearing a badge and others without it.

The security guard was supposed to be interviewed by Fox News’ Sean Hannity, but the host tweeted on Thursday: ‘He cancelled.’
Campos’ disappearance came just hours after MGM Resorts International, which owns the Mandalay Bay, disputed the official timeline of the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, rejecting any suggestion that hotel staff delayed calling 911 for six minutes after Paddock opened fire.

Maybe he did not have a gun because he could not pass a background check. Then there is the matter of the six minutes after he was shot and the massacre began.

The latest chronology raised a series of questions about whether officers were given information quickly enough to possibly have a chance to take out the gunman before he could carry out the bloodshed.
But according to resort officials, it was no more than 40 seconds between the time Campos used his walkie talkie to call for help and Paddock opening fire on the crowd from two windows in his suite.
Earlier in the investigation, police had said that Paddock shot through his door and wounded Campos after the guard distracted him from firing on the crowd out the windows.
Campos’ union president said the latest timeline does not dispute the assertion that the guard is ‘still a hero, saving his coworker, possibly stopping additional shots,’ reported Stephanie Wash.

Two timelines. Mysteries about the motive, whether there was a second shooter, who used his card key when he was gone ?

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