Benghazi redux

The special panel's report is in regarding Benghazi and three State Department heads have rolled.  I was one of those citizens that questioned the administration from the outset regarding the Libya fiasco and think that the report highlighted some important points.

One is that the State Department may be seriously underfunded. The report concludes that budget deficiencies "had the effect of conditioning a few State Department managers to favor restricting the use of resources as a general orientation." I hadn't considered the fact that these civil servants may have had instructions from on high to make due. The bean counters won out and tragedy ensued. The lonely life of the unloved accountant.

 The following paragraph was copied from the full unclassified report which can be found here.

Special Mission Benghazi’s uncertain future after 2012 and its “non-status” as a temporary, residential facility made allocation of resources for security and personnel more difficult, and left responsibility to meet security standards to the working-level in the field, with very limited resources. In the weeks and months leading up to the attacks, the response from post, Embassy Tripoli, and Washington to a deteriorating security situation was inadequate. At the same time, the SMC’s dependence on the armed but poorly skilled Libyan February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade (February 17) militia members and unarmed, locally contracted Blue Mountain Libya (BML) guards for security support was misplaced. Although the February 17 militia had proven effective in responding to improvised explosive device (IED) attacks on the Special Mission in April and June 2012, there were some troubling indicators of its reliability in the months and weeks preceding the September attacks. At the time of Ambassador Stevens’ visit, February 17 militia members had stopped accompanying Special Mission vehicle movements in protest over salary and working hours.

The report is an interesting read, with plenty of blame to go around and accounts of people wading through typical bureaucratic goo. But the last sentence is most salient, "17 militia members had stopped accompanying Special Mission vehicle movements in protest over salary and working hours."

There was something about our U.N. Ambassador statements and demeanor that grated on me. But I think that the President was correct when he said that one should not blame her for her statements when she was merely carrying his own explicit message. The administration was clearly trying to cement and consolidate political gains it had newly won in the region when they gave her her marching orders. But the spin job smelled, at least to anyone that was paying attention.

*
And talking about spin, did you catch this in the New York Times from an anonymous Romney staffer? Some liar should get a medal for truthfulness, pin it right into his pectoral muscle:

“First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business…. Ads are agitprop…. Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context…. All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.”

*
Thank your lucky stars you don't live in Pakistan, a place where the local religious cult is on a rampage killing people who are trying to immunize their own countrymen against polio. Seven aid workers killed as of this morning and the World Health Organization (WHO) has now called off the program.

How do you help people or fix a culture that treats its own, or people trying to offer help, like this? I read an article from Islamabad yesterday that talked about the huge presence of Taliban in their cities. I can't locate it now but this article provides a look.