By Rich Galen
Monday, May 06, 2013
Every Member of Congress and commissioned officer
(civilian and military) in federal service as well as every enlisted service
member takes an oath that requires they promise to:
"support and defend the Constitution of the United
States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…"
This oath is required by statute. The Presidential oath,
the only oath in the Constitution, does not contain that language:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will
faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to
the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the
United States."
I only raise that because the issue of "enemies
foreign or domestic" has raised its ugly head in Boston in Damascus and in
Benghazi.
First Boston.
I don't know very much about the ins and outs of visa
vigilance as they pertain to one Tamerlan Tsarnaev (the dead Boston bomber).
That's not much of a problem.
What is a problem is when the FBI, DHS, NSA, NSC, CIA,
and, for all I know, MIB don't seem to be able to track a guy about whom they
have been warned. And some or all of those agencies were warned by our loyal
allies in the security area, the Russians.
At one point we were told that Tsarnaev slipped through
the immigration net having taking a six month trip to Russia because his name
had been misspelled.
I did a test on this. I did a search on "Rihc
Galen"
Google assumed I meant "Rich Galen" and found
3.3 million hits.
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has since said that the
redundancies in the immigration systems are every bit as good as Google's (my
comparison, not hers) but the reason Tsarnaev got back in was because the FBI
alert on him had expired and so his re-entry was not noted.
That "beep-beep-beep" sound you hear is team
player Sec. Napolitano backing up the bus having thrown the FBI under it.
So many questions. How about the wife? She lives in an
apartment with - forget about bomb parts she might not have recognized - how
about asking what the hell multiple pressure cookers were doing in the living
room. Were they going into the housewares business?
Ok. That's the domestic enemies.
The New York Times was all over a story that President
Barack Obama's off-handed remark last summer that if Syrian president Bashar
al-Assad used or moved chemical weapons that would be "a red line for
us."
Just about everyone now believes Assad has used poison
gas and is, in fact, consolidating his stores of chemical weapons - moving them
around.
One unnamed high Obama Administration source, attempting
to erase, or at least blur, the "red line" was quoting in the Times
as saying:
"If he drops sarin [gas] on his own people, what's
that got to do with us?"
This is known as the Lucky Lindy theory of geopolitics.
Obama (nor anyone else) is eager to get involved in
another Middle Eastern war, but his own off-the-cuff language may have put the
United States into a diplomatic, military and/or legal box.
Then there are the enemies foreign and domestic.
CBS reporter Bob Schieffer on "Face the
Nation," said Greg Hicks, a 22-year foreign service diplomat who was the
highest-ranking U.S. official in Libya after the strike has told Congressional
investigators:
"I thought it was a terrorist attack from the
get-go. I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from
the beginning.
CBS News reminds us on its website that the very morning
the U.N. Ambassador was racing from Sunday show to Sunday show to claim the
attack was a spontaneous demonstration that got out of hand, "President of
Libya Mohammed al-Magariaf, said his government had 'no doubt that this was
preplanned, predetermined.'"
Al-Magariaf said that on "Face the Nation"
moments before Amb. Rice came on to flatly contradict him.
Why? Because Obama was in the midst of a Presidential
campaign and did not want to give Republicans a chance to say that all of his
attempts to avoid the Bushian phrase "war on terror" had emboldened
the terrorists to attack the U.S. compound in Libya.
NBC reported only a week after Obama's inauguration in
2009 that the "War on Terror Phrase [was] Fading" in new
Administration. Obama was using snappy language like: "The enduring
struggle against terrorism and extremism" even back then.
This second term is off to a very, very rocky start and
the Ship of State is tippy because of the incompetence of Obama's own people.
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