“Ground Hog Day” Afghanistan Style — Lara Logan Shining Light Where Needed
[by J. Scott Shipman]
This is worth the 20 minutes. Strategy without clarity, isn’t. There is no clarity or strategy to our current problems in Afghanistan.
“We have killed all the slow and stupid ones. But that means the ones that are left are totally dedicated.” Ambassador Ryan Crocker
Cross posted at To Be or To Do.
H/T Feral Jundi at Facebook.
October 11th, 2012 at 5:34 am
Scott — Pundita very happy, as you can see. Just posted this at my blog (along with the video).
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After posting around 4:00 AM yesterday on the media buzz generated by Logan’s controversial speech, then grousing that no transcript was available, I spent the rest of the day immersed in the hearing on Capitol Hill about the Benghazi raid. So imagine my happiness when I stopped off at Zenpundit ’round midnight and discovered that lo and behold Scott Shipman had scooped up a video of the speech!
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What’s this? [opening an email] A correspondent has just informed me the video is also up at Chicago Boyz with commentary from Lexington Green!
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Yipppeee! This calls for some cumbia music from Bomba Estereo! For those just joining the party, see my October 9 In keynote address CBS reporter Lara Logan warns that for two years Washington has been downplaying the terrorist threat: “There is a major lie being propagated.
[I then add your comments and Lex’s, and a few of my own]
October 11th, 2012 at 6:31 am
Scott — The video was also posted at LWJ and I see from a glance at Google News that others have posted it as well. This is great. I hope every blogger who learns of the video will post it. The more the merrier.
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PS: I think the link I provided to the media buzz post was messed up; here’s the url
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2012/10/lara-logans-war-cry-generates-media-buzz.html
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The media buzz post has links to coverage that her remarks received frm various media outlets on the 9th and NRO’s comments about it on the 8th. When one considers that the news about the speech wasn’t broken until 7th that’s a lot of progress in quick time, considering she’s up against presidential election politics, Syria, the Bengazi Incident, etc.
October 11th, 2012 at 12:13 pm
Hi Pundita,
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Logan’s video is getting around, and not a moment too soon. Thanks for sharing the links!
October 12th, 2012 at 4:23 am
Scott — Gee it really must be making the rounds. Michael Gerson quoted Lara Logan in a very strong way in a great op-ed he did for the Washington Post today.
http://www.kansascity.com/2012/10/11/3863047/michael-gerson-benghazi-is-more.html
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I should take this opportunity to thank zen for featuring my post on Logan’s Sept. 30th 60 Minutes report. In the rush and tumble of events I’m afraid I forgot my manners.
October 12th, 2012 at 9:05 am
Hi Ms. Pundita,
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When I posted, this video had significantly less than the 60K it has at this writing. Thanks for sharing the Gerson piece.
October 12th, 2012 at 8:52 pm
Scott — Re “video had significantly less than the 60K” — you are speaking Greek to Pundita lol. But I will hazard the wild guess this means all is well with viewing the video, which I copied from ZP. Re the Gerson piece, I’m glad you read it.
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I suspect Gen Allen passed the standard to Logan during their last meeting in Kabul. She said during the 60 Minutes report that he was a politician in addition to being a general but the problem is that he isn’t a politician.
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Earlier this year it came out that it was really Allen who was instrumental in turning around the situation in Iraq. He was the first to recognize the tactical importance of the ‘Anbar Awakening;’ Petraeus, a master politician, then ran interference for him in Washington to push for U.S. support of the Sunni tribes in Anbar that were battling al Qaeda. This according to a government-connected military website that talked about Allen prior to his last appearance on Capitol Hill.
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Anyhow, the astonishing part of the 60 Minutes report w/ Logan is that Gen. Allen made the bluntest assessment of Pakistan’s role in the continued ‘insurgency’ in Afghanistan that anyone in his position before had done. This is a point I’m now sorry I didn’t emphasize at the start of my post on the report.
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I thought the title I gave to the post was sufficient to clue the reader but it could have been read as Allen simply saying that the insurgents endured because they could take refuge in Pakistan. He actually went much farther when he agreed with Logan’s analysis of the situation, which was that Pakistan’s military was orchestrating the insurgency.
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All this is clear from the part of the transcript I posted, but again I could kick myself for not hammering out the point when I introduced the discussion between Allen and Logan.
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My point here is that Allen is the workhorse — did you notice he looked like hell in the interview? — but not the one to argue his case in Washington, particularly not at this time, when both Dems and GOP want to mention the situation in A’stan as little as possible in the runup to the election.
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But Logan is herself quite the tactician — reference how she created an earlier controversy to bring attention to the dearth of TV coverage on the A’stan and Iraq campaigns. And now she is showing herself to be a politician. And she is saying all the things that I’m sure Gen. Allen wishes he could say at an open hearing on Capitol Hill.
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I know it’s clutching at a straw, but if she can keep up the din through the election, and if by chance Romney gets into office, there is a chance, just a chance, that things could really turn around in Afghanistan…..
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Hope springs eternal, eh?
October 13th, 2012 at 4:27 am
Hi Pundita,
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Excellent observations, all. Will respond with more detail Sunday.
October 13th, 2012 at 6:07 am
Scott — Roger that. I know you’re all at the Boyd conference but I have some incredible news that I can’t wait to tell. I posted the following about an hour ago. By gum, I always knew that watching Fox would pay off some day lol.
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN CHECKMATES OBAMA ON BENGHAZI
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With one remark Greta Van Susteren, an attorney and the host of FNC’s On the Record, has exposed that Obama administration officials were outright lying about their knowledge of the genesis of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. In doing so she identified a point that had gotten overlooked in the uproar that followed startling revelations during Wednesday’s congressional hearing on security in Libya.
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One revelation was that a live feed could be activated between CCTV cameras at the Benghazi consulate and State Department headquarters in Washington, DC. This arrangement served as State’s danger notification system. During the hearing Charlene Lamb, deputy assistant secretary of state for international programs in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, said, after explaining the system to the congressional panel, that shortly after the attack on the consulate began, a security agent there activated the system. This meant she was able to watch the attack as it unfolded “almost in real time.”
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Last night on her TV show Greta mentioned the notification system, then pointed out that given the live feed, State would have known immediately if there’d been protests outside the consulate earlier in the day. By gum she’s right. Of course the live feed would have been activated in the event of protests outside the consulate!
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That means President Barack Obama and Ambassador Susan Rice would have been notified by State on that same day if there had been protests outside the Benghazi consulate on September 11. They would have needed to know, particularly in light of the violent protests earlier that day outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo.
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So, again, officials were flatly lying these past weeks. They lied every time they told the public that the administration had based its early assumptions on initial reports from the intelligence community that the attack on the Benghazi consulate had grown from protests outside the consulate over an anti-Islam video. The officials didn’t need to wait for the intelligence community to do its work. Again, State would have informed them immediately if there had been protests, based on virtual real-time data.
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[…]
There’s a little more but that’s the meat of it. Isn’t it amazing? She just — she saw what no one else saw, even though we were all looking straight at it during the hearing. And she did it on logic alone, with no need for evidence gathering and lengthy hearings. An attorney worth her weight in gold many times over, it seems. The funny thing is that I caught the show almost by accident — I don’t watch it often.
October 14th, 2012 at 10:15 pm
Hi Pundita,
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The CCTV news comes as a surprise—that they exist, not that they were either ignored or kept out of the news reporting.
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I rarely watch television, but Ms. Logan’s talk is a credit to her craft, and I’m hoping she won’t be flying solo too much longer. As Hillary Clinton said during the General “Betray-Us” kerfuffle, one have to possess a “willing suspension of disbelief” to buy the video argument.
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BTW, the Boyd conference was very good! Zen has a review in the works.