One of the problems with the media is that, too often, they seize on and then misinterpret events that more experienced eyes and hands understand. Given that most reporters and editors are generalists, not specialists, this sometimes turns ordinary bureaucratic procedures into sinister machinations. It’s like sending a rookie to review La Boheme for the first time, and he comes back with the breathless discovery that [warning: spoiler alert] Mimi dies at the end. Well, duh…

Let me offer as an example this story at Breitbart and on World Net Daily. The headline on the Breitbart story reads:

AIR FORCE BANS PERSONNEL FROM READING NEWS STORIES REPORTING NSA SCANDAL

At WND, it’s:

MILITARY TOLD NOT TO READ OBAMA-SCANDAL NEWS — Verizon phone records story off-limits to airmen.

Oh-oh: another example of Obama administration overreach, right? Manipulation of the armed forces to serve political ends? The descending jackboot of fascism?

In fact, it’s nothing of the sort — just CYA business as usual by the Permanent Bureaucracy, Air Force division. And it makes perfect sense.

The memo to the 624th Operations Center – which is a cyberspace wing of the 24th Air Force in Lackland, Texas — instructs personnel that some of the material leaked by The Guardian regarding the NSA’s data-mining efforts and the PRISM program might, in fact, still be classified, and therefore they should not access it, even inadvertently.

Viewing and/or downloading these documents on Air Force NIPRNET computers could constitute a Classified Message incident. Therefore, users are not to access these files for any reason.

Translation: open-source news stories with possible embedded links to stolen classified information, if passed around on unsecured networks,  can get folks into a lot of trouble, by bringing in-house security monitors down on the miscreant’s head to learn whether he or she knew what they were forwarding, however inadvertently. In short, it’s for the airmen’s protection.

And that’s it. Nothing at all to do with the Obama administration — it has plenty of scandals already, but shielding negative news about itself from the military is not one of them. They can get that anywhere: PJ Media is freely available on military computers.

Why is anyone surprised by the NSA’s data-mining program? I’ve been writing about it for several years now, in my trio of “Devlin” novels: Hostile Intent, Early Warning, and Shock Warning, which have just been picked up for e-book publication in the UK, I’m pleased to report. The books have found their audience, especially among members of the military and the intelligence community, in part thanks to my main character — a cipher working for the secretive branch of the NSA called the Central Security Service and known only by his code name, “Devlin,” who gets called into action in the most dire of circumstances — and in part because they accurately reflect the strange and lonely wilderness of mirrors in which people like Devlin live and operate.

My goal has been to illustrate and dramatize in fictional form various nightmare scenarios that keep our counter-terrorism officials awake at night. In the first book, Hostile Intent, it was a Beslan-style attack on a school in the Midwest, followed by an abortive attempt to launch an EMP device on both coasts; luckily, our man Devlin foiled both plots. Here’s a bit on the CSS and what it does:

“Under the authority of National Security Decision Memorandum 5100.20, signed by President Nixon on 23 December, 1971, and amended by President G. H. W. Bush on June 24, 1991,” said Gen. Seelye, “the Sec Def and I believe that you should provisionally authorize a Central Security Service operation to terminate the ongoing incident in Edwardsville.”

“Terminate, how, General?”

“With extreme, exemplary prejudice, sir,” replied Seelye.

President Tyler vaguely remembered the CSS, a special division of the National Security Agency that not one American in a million had even heard of, much less understood its function.  The CSS had been created originally under the Nixon Administration as the “fourth branch” of the armed services, to complement the Army, the Air Force and the Navy/Marines in the burgeoning field of electronic intelligence and combat.  But the traditional-minded put up the predictable bureaucratic fuss, and the CSS was quietly folded in the NSA, authorized to work with each of the individual service branches in capturing and decoding enemy SIGINT. So when, for example, a Navy submarine tapped an undersea Soviet communications cable, or one of the Air Force’s many electronic surveillance overflights picked up hostile transmissions, they were relayed to the CSS for evaluation and, if necessary, action.

But the CSS chafed at being a bystander and, using the “No Such Agency” cloak of anonymity, quickly moved into the void, coordinating covert strikes on Soviet assets with the utmost plausible deniability — “accidents” were amazingly common — and establishing its own presence as a service to be reckoned with.  Still, resistance from the uniformed services, kept it in the shadows of its birth, where it lurked now — the incognito, but highly effective, muscle arm of the NSA.

In the second book, Early Warning, there’s a rip-roaring terrorist assault on Times Square patterned after the real world Bombay attacks of 2008 — and which I wrote well before the actual Times Square bombing attempt; it’s not easy staying ahead of the curve — all part of the triology’s meta-plot involving a shadowy Hungarian-born billionaire named Emanuel Skorzeny with a pronounced animus against the West. (Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.) With the entire island sealed off, Devlin infiltrates Manhattan via a disused Hudson River tunnel, teams up with members of the NYPD’s counter-terrorism unit, and sorts out the bad guys.

And the horse you rode in on

Just when you think the farce that goes by the name of the Obama White House couldn’t descend any lower, along comes this:

In a move sure to provoke congressional Republicans, President Obama is nominating embattled U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice Wednesday to serve as his national security adviser.

The White House also confirmed that Mr. Obama is nominating former aide Samantha Power, who once referred to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a “monster” in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, to succeed Ms. Rice as U.N. ambassador.

For those of you scoring at home, that’s not one, not two, but three flips of the Obama bird to Congress, the American people, and his erstwhile secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Let’s start at the top.

Susan Rice is no more qualified to opine on matters of national security than a character from The Wizard of Oz. Like Obama himself, she is a highly politicized, over-credentialed Scarecrow, with certificates from Stanford, Oxford, and the Brookings Institution in place of a brain. Among her intellectual “achievements”:

In college, she pushed herself to excel. She not only earned Departmental Honors and University Distinction, but also became a Harry S. Truman scholar, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes scholarship. She turned the heads of top administrators when she created a fund that withheld alumni donations until the university either stopped their investments in companies doing business in South Africa, or the country ended apartheid.

After she received her bachelor’s degree in history in 1986, she went on to attend University of Oxford in Oxfordshire, England. Here she earned her M.Phil and D.Phil in international relations, and wrote a dissertation that examined Rhodesia’s transition from white rule.

A protege of Madeleine Albright, Rice joined the National Security Council during the Clinton administration in 1993:

[Albright] recommended Rice for the post of assistant secretary for African affairs in 1997. With her appointment, she became one of the youngest assistant secretaries of state ever. Many elder politicians disagreed with placing a young woman in the position, arguing that she would be unable to deal with older, male leaders. But Rice developed a reputation for her direct, plainspoken opinions, and an ability to bring people to her side of the table. “They have no choice but to deal with me on professional terms. I represent the United States of America,” she says. “Yeah, they may do a double take, but then they have to listen to what you say, how you say it and what you do about what you say.”

In other words, she’s a grievance-monger with a feminist chip on her shoulder, twin virtues which will henceforth inform her foreign-policy perspective as Obama continues his mission to “fundamentally transform” American society by wreaking revenge on his “enemies.” But wait, it gets worse.

Shame of a Nation

No matter what happens with Darrell Issa’s congressional committee meetings this week, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Obama administration, and the cause is Benghazi. It’s impossible to overestimate the blowback that has been gathering steam for the past seven months, now about to erupt with full force. Few reputations will emerge unscathed, Obama’s presidency will be crippled, Hillary Clinton‘s 2016  candidacy will be destroyed — and perhaps some new heroes will be born.

My New York Post column on Friday, which was also linked at RealClearPolitics, sets the stage:

On Wednesday, the FBI released photos of three men present at the deadly jihadist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya; the bureau has asked the Libyans’ help in identifying them.

Which nicely highlights the fact that it’s been more than seven months since Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other brave Americans were killed — and yet there’s been no justice, nor even vengeance, in the matter.

Nor much exposure: We know little more today than we did in the immediate aftermath of the fiasco.

That’s because, right from the jump, the administration has been lying through its teeth about what happened on the night of Sept. 11, 2012 — the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, as it happens. It transparently lied about the Mohammad video, threw the scapegoated filmmaker in jail (where, last time I looked, he still is), and  convened a bogus “accountability” board to whitewash the whole damn thing so as not to disrupt the precious Narrative that Osama was dead and al-Qaeda was on the run.

It was all a lie, of course, and some of us knew it at the time. I wrote about it repeatedly on the Post’s Op-Ed page: you can find examples here, here and here. In this case, however, what happened in Benghazi, Foggy Bottom, the White House, and the Obama re-election campaign headquarters in Chicago was (as the saying goes) worse than a crime: it was a blunder. And that blunder may now bring down the man who never should have been president in the first place, for grotesque dereliction of his duty as commander-in-chief:

Indeed, the State Department’s Inspector General is now investigating the Accountability Review Board that reported on Benghazi in December, Fox News reported yesterday. What Fox called “well-placed sources” say the IG is trying to find out if the State panel failed to interview key witnesses who’d come forward.

In fact, Washington power attorney Victoria Toensing — a Reagan-era deputy assistant attorney general with a strong background in intelligence work — says she’s got a whistle blower inside State who’s itching to go public.

But so far she’s been stymied by officials who won’t act on her request for a security clearance so she can deal with classified material the case entails. Other attorneys for as many as three other potential witnesses from inside State and CIA say they’re having the same problem.

In fact, some whistleblowers allege that they’ve been threatened with reprisals should they come forward — even though federal law explicitly protects whistleblowers.

At his Monday press conference, President Obama shrugged off questions about all this, saying, “I’m not familiar with this notion that anybody has been blocked from testifying.”

There’s another lie — this one of Nixonian quality.  From the moment Obama learned of the attack on the Benghazi compound — learned in part from Ambassador Stevens’ frantic phone calls to Washington, begging for help — what did he do? He went to bed early and flew off to Las Vegas in the morning for a campaign appearance; after all, first things first. And since Barry’s only real function in this administration is as its frontman/pitchman, he was only doing what he does best.

He’ll be aware soon enough. Next week, the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.), will open new hearings on Benghazi — and they could be explosive. He promises to expose new information the administration “has tried to suppress.”

Issa — who previously held the administration’s feet to fire over the still-unresolved Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal — has twice requested guidelines from State, but a department spokesman recently denied that any whistleblowers have come forward and scoffed at reports that they’ve been intimidated.

In fact, word is that some of the whistleblowers may testify that help in the form of a rapid-response force was only hours away — but, for whatever reason, was not authorized.

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A single-action revolver with its loading gate open

What are to make of this? Via the Of Arms and the Law blog (h/t Instapundit) comes this New York Times story about a tragic, accidental shooting — but alas, a story published in order to further the Times‘s notion that inanimate objects, especially inanimate objects of swaggering macho desire, have a mind of their own:

It was the second week in August, a Friday the 13th, in fact, in 1982. I was with a group of college roommates who were getting ready to go to the Omak Stampede and Suicide Race. Three of us piled into a red Vega parked outside a friend’s house in Okanogan, Wash., me in the back seat. The driver, who worked with the county sheriff’s department, offered me his service revolver to examine. I turned the weapon onto its side, pointed it toward the door. The barrel, however, slipped when I shifted my grip to pull the hammer back, to make certain the chamber was empty, and turned the gun toward the driver’s seat. When I let the hammer fall, the cylinder must have rotated without my knowing. When I pulled the hammer back a second time it fired a live round. 

My friend, Doug, slumped in the driver’s seat, dying, and another friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat, raced into the house for the phone.

The commenters at the blog are doing a good job of unpacking not only the principal paragraph above, but the whole intent of the piece (who recounts a story of killing his own friend in order to obliquely further the gun-control meme?), but what does it say about the editing chops at the Times that they would let this pass without at least some clarification? To wit:

• “… who worked with the county sheriff’s department offered me his service revolver to examine.”

Let’s leave aside the sheer irresponsibility of handing a loaded firearm over to a kid. In 1982, the vast majority of police sidearms were double-action revolvers or semi-automatic pistols, which would make the description of the accident above completely unbelievable, unless the firearm in question was a single-action revolver with the hammer down on one empty chamber, about which more in a bit. 

• “… when I shifted my grip to pull the hammer back, to make certain the chamber was empty…”

You don’t check to see whether a revolver is loaded by pulling the hammer back. You check it by pushing the cylinder out (which instantly renders it non-fireable, since there cannot be a round in the barrel) and making sure all five, six, seven, or even eight chambers are clear.

• “When I let the hammer fall, the cylinder must have rotated without my knowing.”

The instant you pull the hammer back on a revolver, the mechanism also rotates the cylinder. It is impossible not to notice this, unless you have never seen a gun before in your life. 

• “When I pulled the hammer back a second time it fired a live round.”

“Pulling the hammer back” will not fire a round. Releasing the hammer will. For this story to be true, the only possible explanation is that the author was (mis)handling a Colt-type single-action revolver — what shooters call a “cowboy gun” — which is loaded and unloaded one round or expended shell at a time via a gate on the right side of the cylinder.

Hide — there’s an armed teenager on the loose

Enough with all the chest-thumping, mingled with manly tears, about the dramatic end of the Marathon bombers’ reign of terror in Boston last week. From the press coverage, you’d think the entire city (which is actually rather small) rose up as one and smote two evil Chechens a stunning blow for truth, justice, liberty and the American Way. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What we saw instead was a city cowering in fear, led by two particularly pusillanimous toads in Gov. Deval Patrick and Mayor Mumbles Menino, who had the services of some 10,000 armed personnel — literally, a small army — to take down… wait for it… a wounded teenager with a gun, and maybe some self-detonating explosives.

Way to go, Boston. You’ve made all of us proud to be Americans.

Now, of course, the liberal East Coast media is getting all mushy about the Brothers Tsarnaev. I’m not even going to bother to cite some of the more egregious examples from the New York Times and elsewhere, part of the MSM’s ongoing bout of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to dealing with Islam and its discontents. John Hinderaker of Power Line has a nice roundup of the usual-suspect idiocy.

But don’t you wish, just once, an American public official would react like a man? A man, say, like this guy, who said this about the Chechens after they attacked a school back in 2004. WARNING: offensive, ethnically biased stereotyping ahead:

“You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child killers? 

“No one has a moral right to tell us to talk to child killers,” he added.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but Margaret Thatcher, whom I’ve met more than once said: ‘A man who comes out into the street to kill other people must himself be killed’.”

Now, that’s some real straight talk about murdering, child-killing bastards. In case you’ve forgotten Beslan, here’s a brief taste of the hell the Muslim Chechens visited upon little kids on the first day of school:

Note that, when the Russian military finally stormed the school, they were accompanied by armed residents of the village, desperate to save their children. In typical ham-handed Russian fashion, the former Soviets managed to kill almost as many people as they saved — but the point is they fought back. They didn’t “shelter in place” (what an odious, bloodless phrase for enforced institutional cowardice), hiding behind locked doors; they got up, got their guns, and finally did something to rid themselves of the aliens in their midst. For they knew — with the example of the Moscow theater crisis fresh in everybody’s minds — that there was no way this atrocity could end any way but bloodily. They wanted to get their licks in, and die like men instead of dumb beasts waiting for the slaughter.

Yeah, right. Via John Hinderaker of Power Line, and courtesy of the NRA, comes this counter-strike against the Mayors Against Illegal Guns’ transparently phony “gun control” ad. Naturally, this gang of criminals won’t answer the question:

What does this tell us about the dishonest Left? That there is no lie they will not tell, no misrepresentation they will not offer in their single-minded pursuit of power. Their breathtaking mendacity is no accident; it’s not only the means to their ends, it’s who and what they are. Shame on us if we fall for it.

So whenever a fascist Regressive proposes a power grab in the name of “common sense,” “reasonable restrictions ” or  ”the children,” call them on it — what part of “shall not be infringed” don’t they understand?

Good for NRA for exposing these frauds, and would that congressional Republicans could must enough testicular fortitude to do the same. But no, they’re too busy reaching across the aisle.

Let’s hope they fail.

****

Cross-posted at PJ Lifestyle

The “doctor” will see you now

As you can read here, I’ve been following the horrific tale of “Dr.” Kermit Gosnell, the alleged Butcher of Philadelphia, ever since the story broke last year. In fact, in the guise of my crazy-lefty character, David Kahane, I wrote a big piece, “The Charnel House of Blackmun,” about it shortly after the grand jury issued its stomach-turning report on this latter-day Mengele‘s crimes. An excerpt:

For us, a day without an abortion somewhere in this great land is like a day without a sermon on climate change: The world is a drab and bitter place, in which the cheery hosannas of the unborn dead cannot be heard, praising the glory of a Gaian world they will never pollute with their presence. Forget that Baudelaire dude and the gimp, Verbal Kint: The Master’s greatest trick was not convincing the world he didn’t exist, but persuading women that it was morally affirmative to murder their own children. Medea, take a bow!

Now, you may quibble that Medea killed children who were, you know, actually ambulatory, but to us and Peter Singer, that is a small matter, a mere detail, a bagatelle of a bump in the road on our way to a more perfect nihilism. Which is why I’m here to celebrate a great American named Kermit B. Gosnell, M.D., a man who was standing up to the forces of bigotry and intolerance and unreasoning pedophobia by providing abortion services at his Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia — until, unaccountably, the state of Pennsylvania arrested him… 

Well, one man’s “baby charnel house” is another man’s monument to the House that Blackmun Built, and surely reasonable men and women of good conscience can agree to disagree, even if Roe is long-since settled law and if you troglodytes so much as try to touch one hair of its sacred little head, we’re coming after you with scissors, suction, a pair of pliers, and a blowtorch… Once you accept the proposition of abortion pretty much on demand, including post-“birth,” this seems to us a distinction without a difference, but there’s no accounting for the lengths to which you Christianist Javerts will go in order to hunt down innocent women’s-health specialists.

While it’s true that the alleged details of Dr. Gosnell’s practice can make you squeamish right-wingers uncomfortable, our brave women are made of sterner stuff. They know the parasitic clumps of cells in their wombs — punishment-by-“baby” for the simple, innocent, joyous act of sexual intercourse — are being eliminated for a higher, nobler cause than mere Christianity. We progressives don’t believe in the afterlife, unless we’re trying to fake some sort of “faith” on television, but we do believe in, shall we say, an eternally resonating resonance that proclaims to the universe: We were here. We lived. We killed. Mission accomplished.

The Mainstream Media, though — until being shamed into it by Kirsten Powers last week in USA Today — has given the case scant attention and next to no coverage. An ever-shifting series of completely unconvincing excuses has been given, including “we don’t cover local crime stories”; that’s rich coming from the same gang that made the death of Trayvon Martin into national news for months on end.

And they kick ass, too: the feel-good video of the year and certain to get the lefties’ panties in a puddle. Be sure to watch it in full-screen mode:

A video thank-you from the troops in Afghanistan to the Miami Dolphins cheerleaders, the Betty Grables of our time.

O Brave New World that has such people in’t.