My Book Ever More Relevant and Benghazi

I soon will take delivery of the second printing and will have copies available. I make another appeal to those who have not ordered a copy to do so and support a worthy cause - The Wounded Warrior Project. Though the words Conservative and Capitalist are in the title, the booklet is non-political in nature. If you find my Memo efforts of interest and maybe even challenging , whether you agree or not with what I write and/or post, then consider this a personal appeal to support my effort to raise money for The Wounded Warrior project. Buy my book expressing my thoughts on raising children. Please make your check for $10.99/copy to Paul Laflamme for a soft cover version and deduct half the cost as a donation to The Wounded Warrior Project. (Add $2.50 for postage and handling.) If you want a pdf version you can download the cost is $5.99. Click on WWW.Brokerberko.com --- Happiest and best of Thanksgivings. With Obama's re-election we have plenty of turkey. --- Wisdom From the Bar Luke ''The Drifter'' says: "We Americans got so tired of being thought of as dumb asses by the rest of the world that we went to the polls this November and removed all doubt." --- My thoughts and what I think about the Benghazi attack: 1)As you already know, I believe Obama is a pathological liar and thus when the attack in Benghazi occurred before the election he had to cover up the fact that al Qaeda was alive and well. After all Osama was dead and GM was alive. 2) He sent Amb. Rice out on Sunday to tell the world the attack was caused by a film maker who produced a derogatory film about Islam. Hillary should have been the one but since she either knew Rice's comments were incorrect because she had real time evidence of that fact or was not even aware of the real time evidence she was spared. 3) Obama sent Rice out with the knowledge The State Department and CIA had full knowledge, in real time, the attack was not caused by a mob but had been prepared and executed by various al Qaeda related groups. Even the Prime Minister of Libya denied the attack was by an unruly mob. 4) Obama subsequently even got Hillary involved initially in his canard because she also verified the attack was caused by a mob. She then flew out of the country and has been heard from since. 5) Obama, when subsequently questioned, asserted he issued orders to protect members of our State Department but nothing happened and that is when he said the matter would be investigated and reported upon after the election. 6) It is highly unlikely Obama issued orders to the military to take action and if he did and they failed to act upon them Petraeus is lying because he said the CIA was never told to take action and The Sec.of Defense would be derelict in not seeing that Obama's orders were implemented. 7)I believe Petraeus, in view of his alleged extra marital affair, might be duped into taking one for the President or, in his testimony he might blow the entire matter wide open. Hillary will continue to be protected, if she can, because Obama owes much to Ole Bill and she may want to run for the presidency. 8) Conclusion: Obama did not protect the Embassy officials, for whatever reason, and he has been covering up and obfuscating ever since. 9) If my assumptions and conclusion are correct I would deem his conduct an impeachable offense but that will never happen. Secondly, I suspect the press and media folks will buy whatever story Obama wants them to and the various investigations will come and go. Sen. Reid needs to protect Obama so I doubt the Feinstein Hearings will actually find any smoking guns. The House Investigation will be a bit more aggressive but will probably result in a somewhat conflictual conclusion and the matter will die a natural typical DC Coverup death. Impeachment is out of the question because it would inflame the nation in rioting that would make Watts look like a Boy Scout cookout. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.) --- While I am speculating and unloading let me express my thoughts about the way Israel retaliates. Jihadists and various radical Arab and Muslim malcontents send missiles into Israel and care not where they land as long as they disrupt life and have the chance of killing civilians. Israel responds as if they are adhering to the Marquise of Kingsberry's Rules of Engagement. They are very selective in their response. The world then attacks Israel while giving radical Islamists a pass. I understand Israel feels compelled to act morally and spends a great deal of time indoctrinating their troops regarding wanton type attacks. Notwithstanding that fact and the improved performance by Israel's military and air force until Israel brings pain to citizens of Gaza, Lebanon etc. will make no vocal effort to blame their leaders. I know what I am saying will never come to pass and borders on the heretic and therefore intermittent confrontations will continue and escalate into real wars as we are about to witness. For moral reasons Israel has chosen to place restrictions on themselves.(See 2 below.) --- Dick -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)Oh, We Forgot to Tell You ... By Victor Davis Hanson he second-term curse goes like this: A president (e.g., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, etc.) wins re-election, but then his presidency implodes over the next four years -- mired in scandals or disasters such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the Iraqi insurgency and Hurricane Katrina. Apparently, like tragic Greek heroes, administrations grow arrogant after their re-election wins. They believe that they are invincible and that heir public approval is permanent rather than fickle. The result is that Nemesis zeroes in on their fatal conceit and with a boom corrects their hubris. Or is the problem in some instances simply that embarrassments and scandals, hushed up in fear that they might cost an administration an election, explode with a fury in the second term? Coincidentally, right after the election we heard that Iran had attacked a U.S. drone in international waters. Coincidentally, we just learned that new food stamp numbers were "delayed" and that millions more became new recipients in the months before the election. Coincidentally, we now gather that the federal relief effort following Hurricane Sandy was not so smooth, even as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Barack Obama high-fived it. Instead, in Katrina-like fashion, tens of thousands are still without power or shelter two weeks after the storm. Coincidentally, we now learn that Obama's plan of letting tax rates increase for the "fat cat" 2 percent who make over $250,000 a year would not even add enough new revenue to cover 10 percent of the annual deficit. How he would get the other 90 percent in cuts, we are never told. Coincidentally, we now learn that the vaunted Dream Act would at most cover only about 10 percent to 20 percent of illegal immigrants. As part of the bargain, does Obama have a post-election Un-Dream Act to deport the other 80 percent who do not qualify since either they just recently arrived in America, are not working, are not in school or the military, are on public assistance, or have a criminal record? Coincidentally, now that the election is over, the scandal over the killings of Americans in Libya seems warranted due to the abject failure to heed pleas for more security before the attack and assistance during it. And the scandal is about more than just the cover-up of fabricating an absurd myth of protestors mad over a 2-month-old video -- just happening to show up on the anniversary of 9/11 with machine guns and rockets. The real postelection mystery is why we ever had a secondary consulate in Benghazi in the first place, when most nations had long ago pulled their embassies out of war-torn Libya altogether. Why, about a mile from the consulate, did we have a large CIA-staffed "annex" that seems to have been busy with all sorts of things other than providing adequate security for our nearby diplomats? Before the election, the media was not interested in figuring out what Ambassador Christopher Stevens actually was doing in Benghazi, what so many CIA people and military contractors were up to, and what was the relationship of our large presence in Libya to Turkey, insurgents in Syria and the scattered Gadhafi arms depots. But the strangest "coincidentally" of all is the bizarre resignation of American hero Gen. David Petraeus from the CIA just three days after the election -- apparently due to a long-investigated extramarital affair with a sort of court biographer and her spat with a woman she perceived as a romantic rival. If the affair was haphazardly hushed up for about a year, how exactly did Petraeus become confirmed as CIA director, a position that allows no secrets, much less an entire secret life? How and why did the FBI investigate the Petraeus matter? To whom and when did it report its findings? And what was the administration reaction? Coincidentally, if it is true that Petraeus can no longer testify as CIA director to the House and Senate intelligence committees about the ignored requests of CIA personnel on the ground in Benghazi for more help, can he as a private citizen testify more freely, without the burdens of CIA directorship and pre-election politics? It has been less than two weeks since the election, and Obama seems no exception to the old rule that for administrations which manage to survive their second terms, almost none seem to enjoy them. The sudden release of all sorts of suppressed news and "new" facts right after the election creates public cynicism. The hushed-up, fragmentary account of the now-unfolding facts of the Libyan disaster contributes to further disbelief. The sudden implosion of Petraeus -- whose seemingly unimpeachable character appears so at odds with reports of sexual indiscretion, a lack of candor and White House backstage election intrigue -- adds genuine public furor. The resulting mix is toxic, and it may tax even the formidable Chicago-style survival skills of Obama and the fealty of a so far dutiful media. 1a)HOMEOPINIONCOMMENTARYRADIOLOG INE-MAIL ALERTSSUBSCRIBECLASSIFIEDSE-EDITION NAPOLITANO: Silencing General David Petraeus Obama administration’s dirty hands The evidence that Gen. David H. Petraeus, formerly the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the author of the current Army field manual, Princeton Ph.D. and, until last week, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was forced to resign from the CIA to silence him is far stronger than is the version of events that the Obama administration has given us. The government would have us believe that because the FBI confronted Gen. Petraeus with his emails showing a pattern of inappropriate personal private behavior, he voluntarily departed his job as the country’s chief spy to avoid embarrassment. The government would also have us believe that the existence of the general’s relationship with Paula Broadwell, an unknown military scholar who wrote a book about him last year, was recently and inadvertently discovered by the FBI while it was conducting an investigation into an alleged threat made by Mrs. Broadwell to another woman. The government would as well have us believe that the president learned of all this at 5 p.m. on Election Day. We now know that the existence of a personal relationship between Mrs. Broadwell and Gen. Petraeus had been suspected and whispered about by his senior-level colleagues and by his personal staff in the military, who worried that it might become publicly known, since before the time that he came to run the CIA. We also know that when he was nominated to run the CIA, that nomination was preceded by a two-month FBI-conducted background check that likely would have revealed the existence of his relationship with Mrs. Broadwell. The FBI agents conducting that background check surely would have seen his visitor logs while he commanded our troops. They would have interviewed his military colleagues and regular visitors and those colleagues who knew him well, working with him every day, and thus learned about his personal life. That’s their job. That information would have been reported immediately to President Obama and to the Senate Intelligence Committee, prior to Gen. Petraeus‘ formal nomination and prior to his Senate confirmation hearing. In the modern era, office-holders with forgiving spouses simply do not resign from powerful jobs because of a temporary, non-criminal, consensual adult sexual liaison, as the history of the FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Clinton presidencies attest. So, why is Gen. Petraeus different? Someone wants to silence him. Gen. Petraeus told the Senate and House Intelligence Committees on September 14, 2012, that the mob attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, three days earlier, was a spontaneous reaction of Libyans angered over a YouTube clip some believed insulted the prophet Muhammad. He even referred to that assault — which resulted in the murders of four Americans, now all thought to have been CIA agents — as a “flash mob.” His scheduled secret testimony this week before the same congressional committees will produce a chastened, diminished Petraeus who will be confronted with a mountain of evidence contradicting his September testimony, perhaps exposing him to charges of perjury or lying to Congress and causing substantial embarrassment to the president. It’s obvious that someone was out to silence Gen. Petraeus. Who could believe the government version of all this? The same government that wants us to believe that FBI agents innocently and accidentally discovered the Petraeus/Broadwell affair a few months ago and confronted Petraeus with his emails a few weeks ago is a cauldron of petty jealousies. From the time of its creation in 1947, the CIA has been a bitter rival of the FBI. The two agencies are both equipped with lethal force, they both often operate outside the law, and they are each seriously potent entities. Their rivalry was tempered by federal laws that until 2001 kept the CIA from operating in the U.S. and the FBI from operating outside the U.S. In one of his many overreactions to the events of 9/11, however, President George W. Bush changed all that with an ill-conceived executive order that unlawfully unleashed the CIA inside the U.S. and the FBI into foreign countries. Rather than facilitating a cooperative spirit in defense of individual freedom and national security, this reignited their rivalry. FBI agents, for example, publicly exposed CIA agents whom they caught torturing detainees at Gitmo, and Mr. Bush was forced to restrain the CIA. Isn’t it odd that FBI agents would be reading the emails of the CIA director to his mistress and that the director of the FBI, who briefs the president weekly, did not make the president aware of this? The FBI could only lawfully spy on Gen. Petraeus by the use of a search warrant, and it could only get a search warrant if its agents persuaded a federal judge that Gen. Petraeus himself — not his mistress — was involved in criminal behavior under federal law. The agents also could have bypassed the federal courts and written their own search warrant under the Patriot Act, but only if they could satisfy themselves (a curious and unconstitutional standard) that the general was involved in terror-related activity. Both preconditions for a search warrant are irrelevant and would be absurd in this case. All this — the FBI spying on the CIA — constitutes the government attacking itself. Anyone who did this when neither federal criminal law nor national security has been implicated and kept the president in the dark has violated about four federal statutes and should be fired and indicted. The general may be a cad and a bad husband, but he has the same constitutional rights as the rest of us. No keen observer could believe the government’s Pollyanna version of these events. When did the CIA become a paragon of honesty? When did the FBI become a paragon of transparency? When did the government become a paragon of telling the truth? Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. He is author of “It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom” (Thomas Nelson, 2011). 1b)Hearings on deadly Benghazi attack will address CIA role Four congressional committees will examine security arrangements during the militant assault in Libya, as well as the Obama administration's public response. By Ken Dilanian The scandal that forced spy chief David H. Petraeus to resign has diverted attention from another problem for the CIA: why the agency failed to anticipate or repel the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed two CIA contractors, as well as the U.S. ambassador and another American. Four House and Senate committees are holding closed hearings this week to examine security arrangements during the assault by armed militants. They will also look at the Obama administration's public response. "The American people need to know, why was the security at the consulate so inadequate?" Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on the Senate floor Wednesday. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Petraeus has agreed to testify even though he stepped down last Friday as CIA director after admitting an extramarital affair. "He is very willing and interested in talking to the committee," Feinstein told reporters. No date for his testimony has been set. On Thursday, the House and Senate intelligence committees will hear from acting CIA Director Michael J. Morell, who replaced Petraeus, as well as Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper and other officials. Officials confirmed last week that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was essentially a front for a much larger CIA base about a mile away. Most of the 30 Americans evacuated after the attack were CIA employees or contractors, not diplomats. The State Department believed guards at the two compounds would help each other in case of emergency. "If one compound came under attack, security personnel would flow from one to the other or vice versa," Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of State for management, said during a hearing last month. Critics want to know why it took six CIA security officers and a Libyan military force 50 minutes to reach the consulate from the annex after the attack began. They also want to know why the team was armed only with automatic rifles. "There is no doubt the annex was not properly defended, and the men assigned there did not have the arms and equipment needed to defend it," said a former CIA case officer with long experience in the Middle East. "There are plans and procedures in place to secure yourself in the field that appear to have been ignored in Benghazi." A senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity Wednesday, said, "The officers on the ground in Benghazi responded to the situation that night as quickly and as effectively as possible." He said the CIA team tried to obtain heavier weapons after the attack began at the consulate, "and when that could not be accomplished within minutes, they still moved in under fire to rescue their colleagues." "The idea that the annex was improperly defended defies the fact that no attackers penetrated the compound and no one was injured until indirect mortar fire killed two courageous men," the official added. "As any military expert knows, defending against such violence is extremely difficult." CIA officials and some retired officers say the facilities had adequate defenses for car bombs and other likely threats, but the small security force was outgunned and outmanned by dozens of attackers. The CIA base "wasn't overrun, nothing was compromised, no one was kidnapped," said another former CIA officer. The two CIA contractors killed, former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, died when mortar fire hit their position on a roof at the annex. Congressional critics also question why the CIA failed to anticipate the assault. The CIA set up its base in Benghazi, in part, to track Islamic extremists who might pose a threat to the Libyan government or Western interests. They thus were watching Ansar al Sharia, a militia that reportedly took part in the attack. "I think there was ample reporting that a threat existed," said a senior congressional official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. The CIA has launched "a very serious review of their security posture" around the world since the attack, the official added. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2)IDF digs in for long haul after sustained rocket fire kills three Israelis As the rockets kept coming through Wednesday night – and the first three fatalities Thursday morning, Nov. 15 - the cautious lift in Israeli spirits generated by the death of Ahmed Jabari, who fashioned Hamas into a paramilitary machine of terror, and the destruction of dozens of missile sites in Gaza, gave way to resignation for a long haul before southern Israel is free of its decade-long rocket nightmare. Thursday morning, a rocket from Gaza killed three Israelis in Kiryat Malachi. By then, some 120 rockets – mostly targeting the major towns of Beersheba and Ashdod, but also smaller locations – had followed Jabari's death. Iron Dome intercepted 27.The first reserve units had been mobilized for possible ground action in Gaza to supplement the air offensive against the Palestinian missile arsenal. But Operation Pillar of Cloud’s first part showed a favorable balance: Palestinian missile fire was as erratic as ever, although intense; Iron Dome filtered out the rockets aimed at Israel’s major towns; Israeli casualties were relatively low though painful; and the enemy in Gaza was decapitated – for now. But most of all, the Palestinians and their allies in Tehran and Hizballah suddenly discovered that the old IDF had come roaring back. In the only former major Israeli operation in Gaza, Cast Lead (late 2008, early 2009), the IDF was slow, unwieldy and unfocused. Its counter-terror offensive was foreshortened by heavy diplomatic pressure before achieving anything, owing to the government’s lack of resolve. In the 2006 Lebanon War, the army was stalled before developing an effective tactical offensive. The IDF of 2012 is in a different class, recalling its rapid-fire performance in the Six-Day War then fought on multiple fronts. In just a few hours late Wednesday, Nov. 14, Pillar of Cloud achieved more than Cast Lead managed in weeks: It was driven by clockwork, integrated intelligence by the Shin Bet and Military Intelligence, precise, surgical air force strikes and a command-and-control with fast reflexes which recalled Israel’s military skills of 45 years ago. The rapid destruction of scores of Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets, whose respective ranges of 45 and 75 kilometers placed Israel’s heartland in line of Palestinian strikes, compared with the destruction of the Egyptian air force on the ground in the early hours of the 1967 war, rather than the bombardment of Hizballah’s long-range missiles in 2006 which failed to draw its sting. In 1967, the Egyptian army had to fight in Sinai without air cover. In 2012, the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip were stripped of their key commander and terror strategist and lost substantial, though not all, its missile arsenal. Wherever Operation Pillar of Cloud goes next – and the IDF is preparing for a long, hard haul – Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz deserve kudos for their performance thus far. It may be said that Israel’s Gaza operation did in fact start on Oct. 24 in Sudan with the attack on the Yarmouk complex manufacturing Iranian missiles near Khartoum. Former Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin Wednesday confirmed that the factory had housed the emergency reserve stocks of the Palestinian Hamas and Jihad Islami in the Gaza Strip. Its destruction contributed to their loss of infrastructure. The tough part of the Israeli operation to eliminate the terrorist war peril hovering over southern Israel from the Gaza Strip is still to come. For now, Hamas is at a loss for a strategic answer to the IDF offensive – unless one is provided by Tehran or Hizballah coming to its rescue. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------