Category: Embassy Attacks

The NYT provides reason to think so:

The protesters in Cairo appeared to be a genuinely spontaneous unarmed mob angered by an anti-Islam video said to have been produced in the United States. By contrast, it appeared the attackers in Benghazi were armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Intelligence reports are inconclusive at this point, officials said, but indications suggest the possibility that an organized group had either been waiting for an opportunity to exploit like the protests over the video or perhaps even generated the protests as a cover for their attack.

Max Fisher rounds up other analysis:

Who actually pulled off the Libya attack, anyway? The "chief suspect" is an obscure extremist Islamist group called "the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades," according to CNN, citing U.S. intelligence. The Libyan group, which has surfaced only this year, appears to support al-Qaeda, but it's not clear if there are any direct operational links. Earlier reports cited Ansar al-Sharia, a loose network of Libyan extremists. The Libyan ambassador to the U.S. blamed former fighters for Muammar Qaddafi's staunchly anti-Islamist regime.

"I can’t ever imagine if the Prime Minister of Israel asked to meet with me, I can’t imagine ever saying no," – Mitt Romney.

It's a lovely complement to the following Romney campaign statement noted by Greg Djerejian:

As reported in the New York Times, after the latest fracas between Obama and Netanyahu, a Romney advisor states:

"Mr. Romney had no immediate comment about Mr. Netanyahu’s challenge to Mr. Obama, and one of his informal advisers on the Middle East said, 'It’s probably better at this point to let Netanyahu make the point because it’s more powerful that way.'" The adviser said he was not authorized to speak on the record." [my emphasis]

So let’s get this straight. First, no one is willing to comment on the record. Second, they double down on this cowardly posture by stating it is better to let a foreign leader beat up the United States’ current sitting President than the campaign itself. Quite classy. A few decades back, this would have unthinkable. Forget about politics stopping at the water’s edge, this is an opposition party openly siding with a foreign leader's world view on one of the leading geopolitical issues of the day.

Yep. And what's new about that? If Romney is elected, US foreign policy in the Middle East will be outsourced to the Likud.

Larison weighs in on Romney's recklessness: 

As a practical matter, this episode shows how useless Romney’s main foreign policy theme has been. According to Romney, Obama “apologizes for” America, and Romney won’t. He tried to shoehorn the embassy attacks into this frame, and it didn’t work for at least two reasons. First, Obama didn’t respond to the attacks by apologizing for anything or sympathizing with the attackers, as Romney’s original statement charged, so it was blatantly false. Romney’s position that the U.S. should never “apologize for” American values is almost beside the point. Would this have made any difference to the people assaulting the embassy in Cairo or the consulate in Benghazi? Would the attacks not have happened if Romney had been conducting his own brand of thoroughly unapologetic activist foreign policy? It seems unlikely.

Romney might have legitimately questioned the security arrangements for the consulate, for example, or he could have made the fair observation that Libya’s new government is very weak and Libya as a whole has serious security problems, but that wouldn’t have translated into the easy and satisfying point-scoring that Romney seems to prefer. It wouldn’t have fit his ready-made scheme of Obama-as-Carter, but it would have spared him of most of the ridicule he’s receiving now. Now instead of portraying Obama as Carter, he has presented himself as the bumbling McCain figure of 2012.

Chait further unpacks Romney's blunder:

The miscalculation at work here is that Romney believed his “Apology Tour” method would neatly fit the events at hand — take an event that sort of vaguely resembled an Obama apology to Muslims who don’t like us, twist it around, and call it a day. But Romney had grown accustomed to spinning fantasies cobbled together from months-old Obama speeches and nurtured into legend by extensive repetition and exaggeration in the conservative subculture. What he failed to realize from the outset was that the embassy attack was an immediate, high-profile event that he could not hope to rewrite so brazenly. Forced to confront the yawning chasm between reality and the fantasy he had wallowed in so long, Romney was exposed and, justifiably, discredited.

Goldblog, trying to learn more about the mysterious “Sam Bacile”, finds one of his wingnut associates:

Steve Klein, a self-described militant Christian activist in Riverside, California (whose actual business, he said, is in selling “hard-to-place home insurance”), who has been described in multiple media accounts as a consultant to the film.

No, Sam Bacile is not a real name, or possibly even a single person, and not Jewish:

Klein told me that Bacile, the producer of the film, is not Israeli, and most likely not Jewish, as has been reported, and that the name is, in fact, a pseudonym. He said he did not know “Bacile”‘s real name. He said Bacile contacted him because he leads anti-Islam protests outside of mosques and schools, and because, he said, he is a Vietnam veteran and an expert on uncovering al Qaeda cells in California. “After 9/11 I went out to look for terror cells in California and found them, piece of cake. Sam found out about me. The Middle East Christian and Jewish communities trust me.”

He said the man who identified himself as Bacile asked him to help make the anti-Muhammad film. When I asked him to describe Bacile, he said: “I don’t know that much about him. I met him, I spoke to him for an hour. He’s not Israeli, no. I can tell you this for sure, the State of Israel is not involved, Terry Jones (the radical Christian Quran-burning pastor) is not involved. His name is a pseudonym. All these Middle Eastern folks I work with have pseudonyms. I doubt he’s Jewish. I would suspect this is a disinformation campaign.”

I asked him who he thought Sam Bacile was. He said that there are about 15 people associated with the making of the film, “Nobody is anything but an active American citizen. They’re from Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, they’re some that are from Egypt. Some are Copts but the vast majority are Evangelical.”

Because he can lie and then repeat it without flinching:

First, the embassy in Cairo–not the White House, not Foggy Bottom, but the embassy–released its statement denouncing (not by name) the makers of the inflammatory film about Mohammed. That was around noon local time Tuesday.

Then the attacks happened.

Then, last night, came Romney's statement criticizing the Obama administration for its allegedly "disgraceful… first response" being "to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."

But: the attack hadn't happened! That first embassy statement was apparently issued because word was circulating about possible violence, and the embassy was trying to quell it.

Then the Obama administration distanced itself from the original embassy statement, and then Romney issued last night's statement.

So here's Romney now, at 10:18 am, now that he must surely know this chronology, still defending his statement from last night and criticizing Obama for defending the attackers.

A money quote from veteran diplomat in Democratic and Republican administrations, Nicholas Burns:

I was, frankly, very disappointed and dismayed to see Gov. Romney inject politics into this very difficult situation where our embassies are under attack, where there’s been a big misunderstanding in the Middle East, apparently, about an American film, where we’re trying to preserve the lives of our diplomats. This is no time for politics. I just think that Gov. Romney has, in a very unwise way, injected himself into a situation where he clearly doesn’t have all the facts.

And makes an assertion that can and should be checked:

Romney is right to bring home the weakness of the Obama administration, exemplified in the disgraceful statement issued yesterday, September 11, by the American embassy in Cairo—a statement, I believe, that would have to have been cleared by the State Department.

Was it cleared by Foggy Bottom? That should be easy to find out. As I say, the notion that trying to distance the US government from a mystery-bigot’s movie, when under threat, even while backing the “universal right of free speech” in the same statement, does not seem to me to be misplaced, let alone “disgraceful”. Update: Kristol can believe what he wants – it’s his habit to invent a reality for himself – but this seems dispositive:

The tweet was posted by a foreign service officer, CNN confirmed. Several State Department sources said that the U.S. ambassador to Egypt did not sign off on the original statement, as she was in Washington at the time.

Input from readers with diplomatic backgrounds:

I work in [a State Department office] where we deal with information security directly. (Please don’t name that office, but it just goes to show Kristol’s completely random Hail Mary on this one.) Do you know how many tweets there are from diplomatic missions? Almost all posts have a Twitter feed now, and they are most likely only cleared by public diplomacy Foreign Service Officers. That means it’s a local issue, has nothing to do with “State Department” officials in charge at home. I know for certain we do nothing of the sort, clearing them in this office.

Such a sad situation, infuriating all of us here.

Another:

I’m a former US Foreign Service officer and can tell you that the statement by the US Embassy in Cairo – which, frankly, seems perfectly OK to me to begin with; what’s really so offensive about it that the Obama administration has to “distance” itself from it? – almost certainly wasn’t cleared with DC, because otherwise it wouldn’t have been issued for another day or two! It would have spent that time bouncing back and forth from the Egypt desk up to the Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs and over then to Public Affairs and God knows who else getting massaged, tweaked, edited and finally OK’d. The reason embassies have Public Affairs officers is so they can handle this sort of statement on their own, though doubtless the DCM, acting as charge d’affaires in the absence of the ambassador, signed off on it.

A Jewish idiot makes a film, a Christian idiot promotes it, Muslim idiots kill over it, and Republican idiots condemn Obama.

— John Lundin (@johnlundin) September 12, 2012

Buzzfeed rounds up incredulous bipartisan reactions to Romney’s latest blunder:

“They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit based on the embassy statement and now it’s just completely blown up,” said a very senior Republican foreign policy hand, who called the statement an “utter disaster” and a “Lehman moment” — a parallel to the moment when John McCain, amid the 2008 financial crisis, failed to come across as a steady leader… “I guess we see now that it is because they’re incompetent at talking effectively about foreign policy,” said the Republican. “This is just unbelievable — when they decide to play on it they completely bungle it.”

Djejerian notices the Romney campaign’s “desperate smallness” on foreign affairs. Earlier Dish coverage of the controversy here, here and here.

Goldblog defends Obama against Romney's now-conscious, repeated lies:

The "sympathy" was expressed not by someone in the administration, but by a tweeter in the besieged embassy in Cairo. The fact that the tweets were written in fear doesn't excuse them (it does make them understandable), but it is ridiculous to blame Obama for them.

Kornacki echoes Jeffrey:

The foolishness of Romney’s reaction is glaring. Pretending that the statement from the U.S. embassy in Cairo was anything other than a completely understandable and reasonable attempt by its occupants to save their own lives borders on disgraceful. Romney’s implication that the statement was issued at the height of the attacks is also false; it was actually released earlier in the day, a preventive measure aimed at keeping the protests from turning violent.

Tomasky's take:

Once again, the Romney pattern holds: pander to the right, issue an irresponsible statement, before Romney and his people even know whether this violence is going to spread, and prove that they will try to use even the violent deaths of four diplomats to political advantage. This isn't an aberration. We've seen enough to know that this is his character.

David Sessions examines the broader Republican response:

Greg Sargent wonders what Romney proposes to do:

According to Josh Rogin, the Romney campaign is going to broaden its case by linking these attacks to Obama’s “failure to assert American leadership throughout the Arab spring.” One wonders whether Romney — who has been widely criticized for failing to spell out his own foreign policies with any meaningful specificity, even as he attacks Obama as a weak appeaser on any number of fronts — will take this occasion to spell out clearly how he would handle the situation.

Adam Serwer doubts a Republican president would have handled things much differently:

Despite the persistent Republican fantasy that the United States conducts diplomacy the way that Sean Hannity used to treat Alan Colmes, it's not clear a Republican President would have reacted differently to initial reports. In 2006, when European newspapers published cartoons denigrating Islam's prophet Mohammed, the Bush administration similarly affirmed free speech rights but said that "We find them offensive, and we certainly understand why Muslims would find these images offensive."

And Jonathan Capehart notices who within the GOP stepped up:

Once again, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is the statesman in a party devoid of them. "We mourn for the families of our countrymen in Benghazi, and condemn this horrific attack," he said in a pitch-perfect statement. "Eleven years after September 11, this is a jolting reminder that freedom remains under siege by forces around the globe who relish violence over free expression, and terror over democracy — and that America and free people everywhere must remain vigilant in defense of our liberties." Would that Romney could learn how to do that.

(Photo: A burnt house and a car are seen inside the US Embassy compound on September 12, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya following an overnight attack on the building. By Stringer/AFP/Getty Images)

Would anyone in the Jewish Twittersphere who has ever met ‘Sam Bacile’ please speak up. — Jeffrey Goldberg (@JeffreyGoldberg) September 12, 2012

So far very little is known about Sam Bacile, the “Israeli-American real-estate developer” behind the crude new hate-film, as Laura Rozen reports:

[T]he man who claimed to have written, produced and directed the $5 million film that reportedly sparked the protests said he blamed lax security at the US government facilities and the protesters for the deaths of the US diplomats.“I feel the security system (at the embassies) is no good,” the man who identified himself as “Sam Bacile” told the Associated Press in an interview from an undisclosed location Wednesday. “America should do something to change it.” “Bacile, a California real estate developer who identifies himself as an Israeli Jew, said he believes the movie will help his native land by exposing Islam’s flaws to the world,” the AP report said. But it’s not clear that Bacile is who he claims. Israeli officials said they would not confirm or deny that he is an Israeli citizen, under that or other names. And there were some hints that Bacile may be a pseudonym, possibly for someone affiliated with the Egyptian Coptic diaspora.

Sarah Posner is also going through the sketchy details about “Bacile”, who is apparently now in hiding:

Consider all the contradictions: small ones, true, like in one account he is 52 and in another he is 56. To the AP he is “a California real estate developer who identifies himself as an Israeli Jew” and to the Times of Israel he is “Jewish and familiar with the region.” And what about that bit at the end of the statement to the Times of Israel–that “even Jesus” should be “in front of the judge”? That sounds like someone who is trying to provoke more than just Muslims. A lot of things don’t add up here about the claimed identity of the filmmaker.