FBI agents in full Studly Wear and Theatrics (SWaT) garb render a Benghazi suspect.

First of all, what’s with the woodland camouflage pattern? The FBI didn’t pick that guy up in a jungle, after all. I’d think that desert tan uniforms would be more useful, if indeed camo of any kind really was necessary.

From the looks of that grey-haired old man who was the object of the exercise, any middle-grade FBI trainee could have handled him alone just fine while wearing Casual Friday khakis and a blue blazer.

In addition to thanking the FBI, however they are attired, we should also call out our gratitude to the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction in the U.S. Code for making it possible to prosecute someone for crimes he committed outside the USA. The Benghazi Mission facility wasn’t even a declared diplomatic premise in a foreign land. Just so long as the USG had leased it, we can enforce our laws against offenses committed there.

Pro tip: remember that fact about the Benghazi property not being a declared diplomatic premise, since it is crucial to the defense of former SecState Hillary Clinton against accusations that she failed to live up to her responsibilities under the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act (SECCA).

The revival of those old accusations is inevitable. Fair or not, using legal means to political ends has been the shared practice in Washington DC since at least Watergate, and we ought to acknowledge it will happen in this case despite how justified those legal means are independent of their political consequences.

Zubayr Al-Bakoush has an ass-kicking coming to him from the countrymen of his victims, but that doesn’t mean that Hillary Clinton will get a free pass.

Here’s what I hope will be a factual corrective to the waves of rumor and nonsense that have eclipsed the events of the 2012 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi.

For instance, when the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testify to Congress under oath and subject to cross examination that there was no possibility of their providing timely support during the attack on the U.S. Mission, they are believable, even before you factor in the realities of limited resources, time, and distance.

There has never been a timely military response to an attack underway on a U.S. diplomatic mission, and due to those realties there never will be.

Debunking is probably a hopeless task, but if you don’t read the whole 2016 Blogger post below, pease do read this key paragraph.

That is the heart of the matter. “No one will mistake this movie for a documentary,” a CIA spokesperson told the Washington Post, but he is quite wrong. Dramatization beats disembodied narrative every time. The public - voters - get their information about current and historical events from entertainment media and will indeed think that they watched events in Benghazi happening before their eyes.

(Originally published on Blogger 22 January, 2016.)

A Review Of A Movie I Haven’t Seen

I have not seen 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. But, do I really have to see it in order to post something about it? Naw.

Someone who has seen it wrote a very good piece for the military veteran website Task and Purpose refuting the movie’s inaccuracies and distortions. Being a former Marine Security Guard, he gets his information from real life rather than Tom Clancy novels and Call of Duty video games, so he knows whereof he speaks. See As A Former Embassy Guard, Here’s What I Know ‘13 Hours’ Got Wrong. Highly recommended if you plan to see the movie.

Something else I highly recommend is background information on the CIA’s Global Response Staff, the employer of those protection contractors in Benghazi. See this WaPo article from 2012 for a description of the GRS.

Above all else, read the Vox piece on how Michael Bay’s 13 Hours promotes some of the worst Benghazi conspiracy theories. While the movie is a good action flick for teenage boys - which Michael Bay freely admits is what he makes - it ends up feeding fantasies and conspiracy theories. See this quote:

The point is not that this narrative is overly simplistic and wrong — of course it is — but rather that in trying to wedge the real-life story into this box, Bay ends up distorting what happened in ways that could end up misleading millions of American viewers who are still trying to figure out what happened in real-life Benghazi and how to feel about it. It also ends up dovetailing, deliberately or not, with some of the most common and most persistent conspiracy theories about the incident.

That is the heart of the matter. “No one will mistake this movie for a documentary,” a CIA spokesperson told the Washington Post, but he is quite wrong. Dramatization beats disembodied narrative every time. The public - voters - get their information about current and historical events from entertainment media and will indeed think that they watched events in Benghazi happening before their eyes. You could ask Senator Tom Cotton whether or not the movie validated his unfounded beliefs about what happened.

Regarding those most common and persistent conspiracy theories, Vox included links to the main Senate and House investigative reports on the Benghazi incident, which make for good reading on this snowy weekend. The Senate Intelligence Committee report directly contradicts the main dramatic moment in 13 Hours, which is the charge that the protection contractors were ordered by the Benghazi Chief of Base (’Bob’) not to respond to the attack on the Special Mission Facility. Did not happen. See pages 4 and 5 of the report.

The House Armed Services Committee report says the same. Furthermore, it explicitly refutes the movie’s other big dramatic theme, which is the purported withholding of U.S. military air support during the incident. At least one of the protection contractors says air support was available. On the other hand, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the general who commanded U.S. Africa Command, and other general and flag officers and senior civilian defense offqicials have testified that it was not. You may decide for yourself which is the more reliable account.

This conclusive rebuttal of the air assets myth is on page 19 of the House report:

The Department of Defense had no armed drones or manned aircraft prepared for combat readily available and nearby on September 11. Secretary Panetta told the Senate in February 2013 that armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), AC-130 ground attack gunships, or other similar planes “were not in the vicinity.” Mr. Reid echoed this to the House Armed Services Committee in May 2013 when he declared “[g]iven the time and distance factors involved, dispatching an armed aircraft to Benghazi was not an option available to us at the time.” As the result of a specific request from the committee, DOD accounted for the location of each of its AC-130 aircraft in the military’s inventory, DOD reported to the committee that no AC-130s were in the region in the days before the Benghazi attack, including for maintenance, crew rest, or merely transiting through the area. However, DOD also reported to the committee that some of these planes were deployed to “southern Europe” on September 14, in order “to support operations in North Africa.” Similarly, the U.S. Air Force F-16 fighters stationed at Aviano, Italy at the time were configured for training flights. None were on combat alert. Furthermore, unlike typical preparations during the Cold War, NATO allies also had no planes on war-fighting status. This meant other nations could not offer combat aircraft to respond on behalf of the United States.

It should not be surprising that no fighters or gunships were available. Tom Clancy aside, the U.S. is not perpetually at war with every country on earth. And that is before you consider the realities of time and space, logistical limits, manpower availability, the need for intelligence preparation, the wisdom of sending flights over a country where there were thousands of loose MANPADS, and other such grown-up things.

But, sadly, none of that outweighs the evidence of video games where airstrikes are always just a mouse click away. The public will not be convinced otherwise after they’ve personally seen ‘Bob’ tell our heroes to stand down.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Anything that deviates from normal is a conspiracy, including when things are precisely normal.

A sika deer with the severed head of a rival male that died in their battle skewered on its antler.  Photograph: Kohei Nagira/Wildlife Photographer of the Year.  Via The Guardian.

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 329-330:

Watching the ground operations at the airfields, [Gen. William] Slim was surprised by the range and flexibility of Snelling’s air supply. Rations, fuel and ammunition were, for obvious reasons, the priority, as well as mail, grain for animals and a host of other supplies. ‘The emergency and fancy demands made,’ he noted, ‘were also met with the promptitude and exactness of the postal order department of a first-class departmental store.’ These included blood plasma, instruments, drugs, spare parts for guns and other weapons, boots, clothing, the daily issue of SEAC (the new troops’ newspaper), typewriter ribbons, cooking pots and even replacement spectacles. The sheer range and logistical effort was mind-boggling.

From 2.30pm that afternoon, the first of a number of Dakotas and Commandos dropped supplies over the Admin Box. The multicoloured parachutes had been another bit of clever forward-thinking. Snelling had been unable to get enough parachutes supplied from India and there was no hope of acquiring the number needed from back home in Britain; SEAC was still bottom of the priority list for parachutes, as for everything. The answer was to make them of paper or jute instead – there were a great many paper mills in Calcutta and Bengal was the jute capital of the world. Paper parachutes, it turned out, would not work, but jute ones would. Slim now contacted the leaders of the British jute industry in Calcutta, asking for their help. He told them that to save time they were to deal with him and Snelling direct and warned them that he had no idea when exactly they would be paid. Despite this, within ten days they were experimenting with various types of ‘parajutes’, as they called them. By trial and error they soon arrived at the most efficient shape and weight of cloth, and within a month they had parajutes that were 85 per cent as reliable as normal silk parachutes. It was agreed they would be colour-coded – red, green, yellow, black, blue and orange, each denoting a different type of load. The cost of producing a parachute was around £20 at that time; the cost of a parajute was £5.

Despite this, Slim was rebuked for not going through the proper channels in securing these essential additions to the air-supply operation – not that he was bothered; some things were more important, and in South-East Asia they all had to use their initiative and think outside the box, no matter what some desk-wallahs thought. The entire war there was becoming an exercise in lateral thinking.

botanyshitposts:

botanyshitposts:

it’s crazy to me that every seed in existence is a little chemical computer taking readings of temperature and moisture and minerals and all that to see if it’s able to grow yet and they’re doing crazy stuff like going into full dormancy and waiting for species-specific conditions etc etc and some seeds will do this in the size of a dust particle (see: orobanche) and some will pack in extra starch and food and do it in the size of a coconut or something… just dissected this flower seed at work that was a woody two-compartment capsule with one embryo per compartment, the whole seed a little smaller than a dime, and I swear to god it had a full soybean’s worth of embryo and food packed in there. it’s just unfathomable to me

sometimes a seed strikes me as being like a little spaceship with on-board life support and stuff. all that’s inherently certain about a seed’s existence is that its parents survived nearby, presumably, so if all goes well it’ll be set up for some kind of success falling where it falls, but ideally the seed won’t see those exact conditions, because being too close could also hurt the seed’s chances of survival… as could being too far away, like if it ends up in a different habitat or ecosystem and the right conditions never happen. The whole food-on-board strategy was a huge buff when they patched it in after ferns and other spore-bearing plants, but it’s still basically outer space, right? Just deploying a hundred ships to different planets in the same star system, hoping it’s not so different down there that it’s unsurvivable? like every seed is a chance and different plants are putting different amounts of food, effort, and strategy into those chances. so you get a million different seeds from a million different species and they all look and act different from the ground up. you know what I mean, man. you know what I’m sayin