Showing posts with label Bob Corker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bob Corker. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Our new German problem: lack of effort. Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

Our new German problem: lack of effort. Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

For months I've closely followed the glacial pace of things in Germany largely via DW,
Deutsche Welle, both on TV and in print, since the U.S. news media has seemed to decide to give Germany and their current Ambassador to the U.S., Peter Wittiga 'hall pass' on all controversial topics, like #Ukraine #Russia #sanctions #ISIS. 
Any one of which, Once Upon a Time in the '70's, '80's or '90's, would have gotten him an invite he could not really turn down.

If you didn't know it, even for something as insignificant as sending 100 German military 
"advisorsto Iraq who would never be put in a position to actually face the enemy, there
was months and months of Sturm und Drang in the Bundestag, in the country 
where Sturm und Drang was born.

As someone who spent LOTS of time over at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. pre and post Fall of the Berlin Wall, on trade and economic issues, and who made enough 
friends there to attend the party at the Embassy celebrating the unification in 1991 -even bringing a German chocolate cake with the German flag's colors on it that I ordered at the #1 German bakery in greater DC, not far from my house in Arlington County- I was especially aghast last year that Germany's policy was, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to be firmly against arming Ukraine so that it could better defend itself.

Which is how it came to be that back on February 8th, before Chancellor Merkel's visit to DC, I asked the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, @SenBobCorker
How is #Merkel #Germany an ally vs. Isis if sending 100 Bundeswehr 2 TRAIN Iraqis is political crisis? 

Condescending, patronizing pols in Germany acted like their troops were almost too important to actually deploy them to the Mid-East to accomplish something tangiblethat was in the West's best interests. But did you see anything about this in the newspaper or on network TV at the time?

And not once in all the many long months since the shoot down of the Malaysian flight 
MH17 over Ukraine last August by Russian-armed and trained separatists has the Ambassador Wittig gone on a single American Sunday morning TV chat show to lay out the position of Germany to the American people, whose own sons and daughters, husbands and wives continue to be stationed in Germany in the tens of thousands to defend Germany against the existential threat that President Obama claimed in one of his 2012
debates with Mitt Romney did NOT exist -Putin's Russia.

Well, history has shown us who was right about that question, haven't they?
And the Russia reset, too.

No, these days, the Foreign Ministry geniuses at the German Embassy on Reservoir Road prefer to employ their old standby, checkbook foreign policy, and simply pay for ads on Foreign Policy magazine's email newsletters, like this one I received, below, so they aren't forced to explain or defend their policies in-person to people who know the facts and could pin them down.
Yes, it sort of explains a lot about the current Foreign Policy Establishment and what it just winks at:

And paying for ads also means they don't have to deal with curious ethical issues like this:
#Germany hires ex #Stasi to check #Facebook for critics of #immigration policy. 

So, to sum it up, Peter Wittigthe German Amb. to the U.S. has not appeared on one of the most guest-friendly forums he could possibly appear on in all of DC, esp. for an important ally like Germany, Sunday morning chat shows, and been forced to defend Germany's feckless position on all these important matters, even while smaller countries with much less resources are continuing to punch above their weight.

Meanwhile, Germany, the European economic giant opts largely to stay on the sidelines as a spectator in the fight against ISIS, preferring to play the role of pit-crew grease monkey,
and not be one of the actual participants.
How much longer is this kind of unhelpful behavior going to be allowed to continue -and continue to be unremarked upon by the American press?




















Sunday, September 30, 2012

More useful clarity on President Obama's Libyan Lies, Misrepresentations & Misadventures: Obscure film was NOT responsible for riot there, security was lax in Benghazi, U.S. Marines were NOT there during consulate attack, and FBI agents are still NOT there two weeks later, a fact that ABC News' Friday evening newscast continued to neglect to mention



senatorcorker video: Appearing on Fox News Channel, Tennessee Senator Bob  Corker, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sounded-off on the lack of information and cooperation the Comm. is receiving re the Benghazi attacks on September 11th. Corker believes the Obama administration's response to Libya consulate attack is "Nothing Short... of Benghazigate." "Both Democrats and Republicans want answers to what happened." Uploaded September 27, 2012. http://youtu.be/wLk6o3N8cB8 
More useful clarity on President Obama's Libyan Lies, Misrepresentations & Misadventures: Obscure film was NOT responsible for riot there, security was lax in Benghazi, U.S. Marines were NOT there during consulate attack, and FBI agents are still NOT there two weeks later, a fact that ABC News' Friday evening newscast continued to neglect to mention
And on Friday, sixteen days after the death of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christoprher StevensABC News national newscast devoted ZERO time to Obama's serial lies about what happened in Libya, not mentioning Libya even once.

No, instead, the lead story was on TSA agents pilfering airline passenger goods. Really?
Yes, nothing at all about no FBI agents being in the country more than two weeks later to investigate.


The Washington Post

In Libya, security was lax before attack that killed U.S. ambassador, officials say
By Ernesto Londoño and Abigail Hauslohner
September 29, 2012 at 2:12 PM
On the eve of his death, U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was ebullient as he returned for the first time in his new role to Benghazi, the eastern Libyan city that embraced him as a savior during last year’s civil war. He moved around the coastal town in an armored vehicle and held a marathon of meetings, his handful of bodyguards trailing discreetly behind.
But as Stevens met with Benghazi civic leaders, U.S. officials appear to have underestimated the threat facing both the ambassador and other Americans. They had not reinforced the U.S. diplomatic outpost there to meet strict safety standards for government buildings overseas. Nor had they posted a U.S. Marine detachment, as at other diplomatic sites in high-threat regions.
Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-libya-security-was-lax-prior-to-deadly-attack/2012/09/29/a56ffca0-0992-11e2-afff-d6c7f20a83bf_story.html


The Weekly Standard

Our Fearless Misleader
By Stephen F. Hayes
October 8, 2012, VOL. 18, NO. 04
After more than two weeks of obfuscation and misdirection from the Obama administration, the American public is coming to understand what the U.S. intelligence community learned in the 48 hours immediately following the September 11 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Among the important new details:
Read the rest of the post at
https://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/our-fearless-misleader_653228.html


New York Times
Security Fears Hobble Inquiry of Libya Attack
By David D. Kirkpatrick, Eric Schmitt and Michael S. Schmidt
Posted online September 27, 2012
BENGHAZI, Libya — Sixteen days after the death of four Americans in an attack on a United States diplomatic mission here, fears about the near-total lack of security have kept F.B.I. agents from visiting the scene of the killings and forced them to try to piece together the complicated crime from Tripoli, more than 400 miles away.
Investigators are so worried about the tenuous security, people involved in the investigation say, that they have been unwilling to risk taking some potential Libyan witnesses into the American Embassy in Tripoli. Instead, the investigators have resorted to the awkward solution of questioning some witnesses in cars outside the embassy, which is operating under emergency staffing and was evacuated of even more diplomats on Thursday because of a heightened security alert.