Error Theory

Stung by the widely circulated “SEAL pals” account of what really happened in Somalia (discussed here last Friday), the Obama administration had National Security Advisor James L. Jones and a number of anonymous Pentagon sources give their side two days ago in a Washington Times exclusive. Their mission, according to reporter Bill Gertz, was:

... to dispel Internet reports that the military was delayed from taking action by indecision inside the White House.

Clintonesque parsing of words is evident throughout the Jones-Pentagon account, amounting on more than one occasion to outright dishonesty. Yet the actual information they provide (as opposed to the lawyerly spin they try to put on it) actually confirms the most damning details in BooBooFan’s purported SEAL report.


Exhibit 1: The Rules Of Engagement.

BooBooFan states the ROE this way:

Once [SEAL teams] arrived, BHO imposed restrictions on their ROE that they couldn't do anything unless the hostage's life was in "imminent" danger.

The Pentagon’s rebuttal states the ROE without any requirement that the danger be "imminent":

"It took awhile to get facts and then to get the military on scene," said one senior military official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing special forces operations. "As the picture got more clear and commanders' requests went back down the chain, the guidance was: 'We would like a peaceful resolution. However, if Captain Phillips' life is in danger you can take appropriate action.'

But we know from Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, speaking at the time of the incident, that the ROE did specify "imminent danger," and that this was interpreted literally:

Navy officers aboard the USS Bainbridge were in the midst of a drawn-out hostage negotiation when Navy snipers saw one of the pirates aim his AK-47 machine gun at Capt. Richard Phillips's back and concluded the American was in "imminent danger," said Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, commander of naval forces in the Middle East.

Gertz’ report includes Gortney’s earlier statement, but without any comment on its inconsistency with the current rebuttals. Intead, Gertz just relays the interpretation that is presented to him, where the Pentagon dismisses the “imminent danger” claim by denying that the ROE was in any way restrictive:

The posting also stated that rules of engagement imposed by the president prevented action unless the hostage's life was in imminent danger.

The military official said the commander had authority to take action at all times because Mr. Phillips was being held at gunpoint.

Yes, but as soon as the pirates took their weapons OFF of Philips, our sailors were barred from taking action. This is exactly the opportunity they would have been waiting for in order TO take action. So the ROE was, you are free to take action, UNTIL you have an opportunity, then you can't, as actually occurred when Philips briefly escaped his captors.

Jones and the Pentagon spokesman try to cover this up, Jones by mis-stating the ROE, the Pentagon spokesman by pretending that the ROE did not really restrict anyone, but Vice Admiral Gortney's statement makes perfectly clear that the crazy ROE was followed to the letter. Instead of taking out the pirates at a moment of minimum risk to Captain Philips, they actually waited until Philips was in maximum peril. With all due credit to our soldiers for following orders, that is absolutely insane.


Exhibit 2: The passed-up rescue attempts

Here our anonymous Pentagon spokesman takes the lawyerly parsing of language to new heights, pulling off an amazing bait-and-switch.

BooBooFan’s claim is devastating if true:

The first time the hostage jumped, the SEALS had the raggies all sighted in, but could not fire due to ROE restriction.

The Pentagon's reply seems to be equally devastating:

However, military officials at the Pentagon involved in the operation said Navy SEAL snipers had not arrived on board the Bainbridge at that time and therefore could not have fired on the pirates.

Except BooBooFan never said it was the SEAL sniper team that had the Islamofascist pirates sighted in, and the Pentagon’s own account verifies that regular SEAL teams were already on site. In Gertz' paraphrase:

Mr. Obama first authorized a few Navy SEALs from a base in Africa to deploy to the Bainbridge and take necessary action. The team was flown by transport aircraft and parachuted to waters near the warship, officials said.
…
The arrival of the first SEAL team gave the military an emergency capability if the pirates holding the ship’s captain became violent. Mr. Jones said the Pentagon requested a second, more complete SEAL team to be dispatched from the United States and Mr. Obama approved that request as well.

Once Captain Phillips leapt in the water, it did not require snipers to take out the pirates. As I put it in my own initial remarks on the subject:

WTF? No one was ready at the machine gun to waste the pirates when this guy got clear?

According to BooBoo, a SEAL team WAS ready, and Jones' account confirms this detail. It is only some slippery use of language on the part of the Obama-defending military spokesmen that make this sound like a debunking, when it is actually a confirmation.


Exhibit 3: It was either Obama himself, or his immediate underlings, who devised the ROE

The administration’s rebuttal effort takes pains to paint the controversial Rules of Engagement as coming from CENTCOM, not the president:

At the Pentagon, military officials said the rules of engagement were set by military commanders at Central Command and were more limited than combat rules because the Navy regarded the operation as countering criminal activity, namely piracy.

But this is a distinction without a difference. As Commander In Chief, Obama has his own men at CENTCOM, and being the president’s men, they would have gotten their way.

Thus BooBoo’s claim that the prohibition on taking any propitious opportunity to rescue the hostage came from BHO is borne out. Thanks to Jones et. al., we now know that this crazy ROE did come the top, if not from BHO himself then from his immediate underlings.

The distinction that does make a difference is the clear Obama stamp. The Obamatons declare outright that their preferred outcome was to negotiate with the pirates!

Authorities went through "a deliberate, slow deliberate process to let the negotiation process work itself out to a nonviolent end," he said. "And unfortunately, that did not occur."

BooBoo never leveled that accusation, but I did. I was trying to tear the cover off when I titled my first commentary, “Obama WANTED to negotiate with the pirates.” Now, thanks to Jones et. al., we have confirmation of that too.

This is what the crazy ROE was really all about. The order was: if you see that the pirates have left Captain Philips unguarded, giving you an opportunity to rescue him by killing them, DON’T TAKE IT. They (the Obama people at CENTCOM) preferred to have the pirates alive and in possession of Captain Philips. They even have the gall to call it “unfortunate” that the Islamofascist hijackers ended up getting taken out!

For two years now I have been working with Tom Burnett Sr. (father of murdered Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Jr.) to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent atop his son’s grave. Unlike the new Obama CENTCOM, we do not find the violent termination of an Islamofascist hijacking (with no loss of life to the hostages this time) to be “unfortunate.” Good grief.


Exhibit 4: No more War On Terror

A second Obama stamp is that decision to treat the Islamofascist pirates as engaged in criminal activity instead of acts of war. Technically, they are engaged in both. Some of the Somali pirates are linked to al Qaeda. ALL of them are practicing their religion of Islamic supremacy, which encourages the taking of booty. From Muhammad’s biographer Ibn Ishaq (at 326):

Allah said, ‘No Prophet before Muhammad took booty from his enemy nor prisoners for ransom.' Muhammad said, ‘I was made victorious with terror. The earth was made a place for me to clean. I was given the most powerful words. Booty was made lawful for me. I was given the power to intercede. These five privileges were awarded to no prophet before me.'

The Koran grants similar allowance to Muhammad’s followers:

So enjoy what you have gotten of booty in war, lawful and good. [Koran verse 8.69]

To al Qaeda, piracy is a core part of their religion, just like that “made victorious with terror” part. Fighting piracy is part and parcel of fighting al Qaeda and fighting terror. That makes it clearly covered by our 2001 declaration of war against those who attacked us on 9/11. But while they are still waging war on us, Obama has unilaterally decided to put the War on Terror into retirement. The official term now is “Overseas Contingency Operations,” and along with the language change, the tools of war are also being abandoned in favor of treating Muslim acts of war as criminal activity only.

As the Pentagon admits, the don’t-rescue-if-you-can-possibly-help-it ROE derived directly from this signature Obama policy choice. Here it is again:

At the Pentagon, military officials said the rules of engagement were set by military commanders at Central Command and were more limited than combat rules because the Navy regarded the operation as countering criminal activity, namely piracy.

The pretense that this somehow came from our military rather than from the White House, when it obviously got into the military through the White House, is completely disingenuous.


Exhibit 5: the delay

With all the misleading language employed by Jones and his Obama-defense crew, it is hard to put much stock in their claim that Obama and/or his CENTCOM dopplegangers were not behind the two days or so that it took before the order was even given to get SEAL teams moving to the site. Gertz’ Pentagon sources talk about the time it took to actually move the SEALS from the East Coast to the Middle East, but that isn’t the issue. The issue is why it took so long to authorize the move.

BooBooFan said that the commander on the site wanted the SEALS en route ASAP:

BHO wouldn't authorize the DEVGRU/NSWC SEAL teams to the scene for 36 hours going against OSC (on scene commander) recommendation.

The rebuttal consists of insisting that once CENTCOM asked Obama to authorize the SEAL teams to go in, “the request to use the forces was approved in a matter of hours.”

Yes, but how long did it take Obama's CENTCOM underlings to get around to asking for authorization? Again, the Pentagon rebuttal relies on the distinction between CENTCOM and Obama, but there is no difference between the two. Obama has his dopplegangers at CENTCOM. After all, he IS the president.

The actual information provided by Jones et. al. supports BooBooFan’s time-line. The SEAL teams were apparently not authorized to get moving until sometime after the Bainbridge arrived on the scene (more than a day after the American flagged Maersk was commandeered).

Does that sound like our military? Steaming into a crisis situation without getting all necessary men and material en route? What would be hard to believe is that the commander on the scene did try to insure that SEAL teams were en route as soon as he got underway, yet according to the new information, SEALs were not authorized for something like a day and a half, just as BooBooFan claims.

Why the delay? Why did there need to be special presidential authorization at all? Do we treat SEAL teams like nukes now? They can’t be moved without orders from the highest level? The more likely scenario is that when Obama’s men at CENTCOM got the request to send over the SEAL teams, they held it up, giving Obama a chance to mull it over, then after much insistence from commanders on the scene, they decided to ask Obama for formal permission to send over the SEAL teams, which Obama authorized after the unspecified “few” additional hours.

In sum, Jones et. al. manage to corroborate in detail almost all of BooBooFan’s information, indicating that his purported SEAL sourcing is accurate. So thanks very much to the Obamagangers, and a big thumbs down to Bill Gertz for helping them to elide the numerous inconsistencies between their information and their spin.

At first blush, the Gertz article reads like an effective rebuttal, until you start paying attention to the actual information content instead of how it is characterized. Under scrutiny, not one point of the supposed rebuttal stands.


Epilogue: Obama’s numerous unreported Islamofascist ties

It might be unfair to insist on the logical implications of the Obama administration’s ROE (that they WANTED to negotiate with the pirates), because we all know that Democrats are not logical. To a “violence only begets violence” sloganeer like Obama, it might seem axiomatic that we should not take action unless at the final instant it becomes absolutely necessary.

Of course that too is a form of wanting to negotiate with the pirates. It is a world view in which negotiating is always seen as the better or higher course. But Obama might not be this kind of well-meaning Democrat. The more worrisome possibility is that what looks like a kumbaya-type penchant for negotiation with everybody may only be a ruse. After all, Obama is certainly not interested in negotiating with his real enemies: the Republicans, yet he is interested in negotiating with Syria and Iran, with Hamas, with the mythical “moderate Taliban,” and every other Islamic supremacist entity he can find, including a dingy-full of Islamofascist pirates.

Is it just coincidence that, except for his racial-separatist wife and the communist pedophile who mentored him as a child, every single one of Obama’s long-time mentors and confidants is not just Muslim, but is actually Islamofascist? Count ‘em up. If the media had properly reported ANY of these Islamofascist connections, Obama would never have been elected.

1. William Ayers, the proud domestic terrorist who gave Obama a resume by picking him for the board of the Annenberg Challenge (where the two of them funneled education funds to Afro-centric racists like Obama's pastor/mentor Jeremiah Wright). In addition to being a communist, Ayers apparently converted at some point to Islam, giving his children Nation of Islam names and adopting for himself the Muslim honorific "Abu Zayd,” meaning “father of Zayd.” Thus Ayers named both his son and himself after Black Panther/Nation of Islam thug Zayd Malik Shakur, who murdered NJ policeman Werner Forrester in 1973.

Obama told documented lies about his relationship with Ayers, at first denying any significant relationship, before it came out that they worked together for many years, and that Obama’s “coming out party” in Chicago electoral politics was hosted at Ayers’ home.

2. Raila Odinga, Kenyan Prime Minister and a Obama's fellow Luo tribesman. (Odinga says he is Obama's cousin. Obama says not quite.) Like Obama, Odinga calls himself a Christian, but in late 2007 he was outed by Kenya's Muslim leaders nya for signing a secret Memorandum of Understanding with them where he begins by declaring Islam to be the only true religion and ends by promising to impose Sharia law on Kenya. (Odinga recently removed his rationalizations for the MoU from his “Odinga for President” website, but I saved a copy.)

During a 2006 trip to Kenya, Obama campaigned extensively for Odinga. The interference in Kenyan politics becoming so grating to Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki that he ended up calling Obama a “stooge" of Odinga.

3. Jeremiah Wright, the racist, America-hating, "ex-Muslim" pastor at Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Wright earned a masters degree in the study of Islam, where he presumably learned Muhammad’s teaching that Muslims who reside in Infidel territory are supposed to pretend to be infidels, if by doing so they can advance the cause of Islamic conquest. (See Koran verse 16:106, and the hadiths of Tabari 8:23 and Sahih Muslim, book 19, 4436.)

Wright’s “Christian” church celebrates Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and teaches the Islamic version of the law of love: to love members of your own group while hating outsiders. In particular, Wright teaches hatred of white people, as NOI leader Louis Farrakhan does.

4. Khalid Al-Mansour, who managed Obama's admission to Harvard Law, is another radical Nation of Islam racist, who once declared that God wanted blacks to go around cutting white people's noses off.

5. Rashid Khalidi, Obama's best dinner buddy, is a PLO terror supporter.

6. Frank Marshall Davis The only identifiable mentor/confidante of Obama who is not a known Islamofascist is Frank Marshall Davis, the communist pedophile who shepherded Obama as a boy in Hawaii. (Davis wrote in his memoirs that he didn't want to "disappoint" a 13 year old girl by not having sex with her.)

7. Obama's father Then there is Obama's Muslim/Communist/racist father, who Obama never met, but does dream about. Barrack Sr. was a member of a Kenyan opposition party when he slammed the sitting regime for not being socialist enough or Afro-centric enough, calling instead for "Europeans" and "Asians" to be stripped of their property.

8. Obama's wife Last and probably least is Michelle, whose Princeton thesis favored a black-separatist viewpoint, and is lauded as a "fellow traveler" by her communist-conversant husband.

Tangential other Islamofascist connections abound. Obama had Nation of Islam personnel on his senate staff. The primary financial backer of Obama “cousin” and confidant Raila Odinga is Moammar Ghadaffi. (Ghadaffi calls Obama a Muslim, and if anyone should know, it is this confidant of Obama’s own secret-Muslim confidant). Hugo Chavez, who has a long relationship with Obama mentor William Ayers, also has ties to al Qaeda, and uses the Islamic salutation “inshallah.”

Obama himself seems to have told some very bold lies about his own Muslim upbringing, denying that he was raised Muslim at all, and that he ever prayed in a mosque, while childhood friends recall praying in the mosque with him, and say that he was “previously quite religious in Islam.”

Obama’s grandmother was also caught lying about her religion, telling USA Today that she is a Christian, just a year after telling the New York Times that she is “a strong believer in the Islamic faith.”

Thus we have Obama, his cousin and his grandmother, all caught lying about their religion. What accounts for it? Well, the Islamic religion does not just permit lying about religion. It actively calls for deception, wherever it can help the goal of Islamic conquest. “War is deception,” was one of Muhammad’s guiding principles, and infidel territory is called in Islam “dar al harb,” or “the world of war.”

Obama is turning out to be a liar about many things. He denied, for instance, that he ever worked for the ACORN vote-fraud group, despite documentary proof to the contrary, but the only ones who exposed it are bloggers.

The Obamatons are so confident that our dishonest media will cover up for them that they don’t even seem to care if their lies are plausible, like the lunatic claim that Obama’s deep bow to Saudi King Abdullah was just a two handed handshake, when the video clearly shows his left hand draped across his knee. Immediately after signing the trillion dollar porkulus spending bill, Obama declared himself to be a crusader for fiscal responsibility, out to slash the deficit, and the media switched to the newspeak without a ripple.

Thanks the malfeasance of the press, refusing to report on ANY of Obama’s extensive Islamofascist ties, we are now stuck with a president of suspect loyalties. He presents himself as pursuing the pacifistic, appeasement minded policies of his Democratic Party cohorts, and that may well be the real explanation for his fecklessness and dishonesty. But bad as that would be, it is not the most likely explanation.

Not surprisingly, Obama is able to find yes-men in the Pentagon who are willing to cover up for him too, while those who are skeptical will have to be wary of getting purged. If Obama IS a secret Islamic supremacist, will our military be able to preserve itself, and the nation? There are some mistakes that are not recoverable, and handing the presidency to a man with extensive Islamofascist ties may well be one of them.