Yesterday, I told how I stood at a plaque in memory of Glen Doherty one of those killed in the Benghazi attack. It was located in a house next door to where I was staying. When I returned back to that house I learned that our Special Forces had captured Ahmed Abu Khattala in Benghazi and hurried him out of Libya into the arms of Americans waiting to interrogate him aboard a Navy ship. Khattala is thought to have been and is indicted for being involved in the attack that killed Doherty.
He will be brought back to America where he will be put on trial for his involvement in the killings. This has occasioned much bickering among the pundits bringing back many of the post-9/11 discussions. Should he be tried by the civilians or the military? Be confined at Guantanamo rather than to a federal lock-up? Should he be provided counsel or held in a state of ongoing interrogation? Should he be tortured pursuant to an Alan Dershowitz torture warrant? Should he be given his Miranda warnings?
One aspect of the arrest that intrigues me is its timing. Why now did they grab Khattala? Reading some of the reports about the incident calls to mind the matter of Khairullozhon Matanov. I wrote about him recently. He was the one who could have been arrested quietly and simply by one or two Quincy cops and taken into Boston. But rather than that, he became the victim of a huge FBI publicity production (stunt) involving black vans and highly armed FBI SWAT teams invading his apartment where he slept harmlessly early in the morning. You’d have thought they were after a man dripping with a history of armed violence rather than one with no criminal record one of whose major crime involves lying to an FBI agent about a dinner engagement.
The orchestration of this event which our local television stations providing endless coverage of demonstrates how our media can make something out of nothing.. Helicopters that circled the Boston courthouse over and over again provided us views of nothing more significant than the courthouse. TV pundits forced to blabber because nothing was happening convicted Matanov of every possible crime connected with terrorism.
The show could only have come about by the need of Boston’s U.S. Attorney Ortiz to re-run the publicity of the Marathon Terrorist Attack on April 15, 2013. This is done in order to prejudice the public against the defendants who will shortly come to trial for offenses related to that attack.
Ortiz’s trick of pre-trial publicity designed to prejudice defendants has come back to bite her. Djoker Tsarnaev’s lawyers have been able to show that she has done this dirty job quite well. They have filed for a change of the trial’s venue to Washington, DC. It is unlikely they will get it but grounds for a reversal after conviction due to a biased jury will remain a real possibility.
I suggest the comparisons of Matanov with Khattala because reading the accounts about Khattala it seems quite obvious to me that he could have been apprehended at any time and probably with significantly less hype. If David Kirkpatrick of the NY Times is to be believed Khattala “lived openly, with his mother in the el-Leithis neighborhood of Benghazi.” He “sat for repeated interviews with Western journalists and even invited a correspondent for tea” since the Benghazi attacks. A person who spent time in prison with Khattala said, “He’s sincere, but he is very ignorant, and I don’t think he is 100 percent mentally fit.”
Knowing the propensity of prosecutors and politicians to use one event to hide others one must ask why the Khattala arrest and publicity at this time. Obama has tried to turn it into another Osama bin Laden type event. He’s dealing with low poll numbers and the November elections loom over the horizons but I’d guess he’d have waited to seize him until later if that was the reason.
I’d guess it has to do with trying to change the story concerning the release of five of the worst of the worst from Guantanamo in exchange for a troubled American soldier – five terrorists who Hillary Clinton said don’t present a threat to America but only to Afghanistan and Pakistan – the same thing that could be said about the Taliban – or, even more so ISIS; or what I truly believe it is to change the conversation so that Obama can hide the dismal failure of our Iraq Embassy of 5,000 run by our State Department (under Hillary and John Kerry) to predict the rise of ISIS. The squabble in Congress over what is to happen to Khattala has made it take its eyes of this monumental failure.
That failure has led us back into combat in Iraq. That more than anything is what Obama does not want us to see or talk about. While we need him to tell us why we must violate the Ming Ling Doctrine and go back to save a leader of a nation where people despise us; we also want to know why we have the largest embassy in the world in a two bit country staffed by 5,000 Americans who did not predict the rise of ISIS.
McCoy, Alfred W.,”The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade” New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991.
McCoy used to teach at Wisconsin. He might still be there. There’s also an ex-DEA agent named Levine who has much to say about South America, and, Oliver North. He has a blog.
Matt and Jim: incisive comments. Why do the FEDs/Media make a spectacular show of the capture of a man who’s been hiding in plain sight for two years? First, to justify their existence; second to scare the American people into thinking the world is scary (it is, a bit) AND more tax dollars should go to the FEDS to bolster their exorbitant salaries; third, to keep the spotlight on the FEDs and MassMedia (it’s a symbiotic relationship) so we American taxpayers: A. think their wonderful, and B. Don’t mind paying their ever more wasteful salaries; fourth, to justify expanding our massive police state (spies/homeland securityFBI) etc. sixth: so the American people will stop asking “Why don’t you do something to stop or capture these international terrorist, these international drug traffickers/ these international flesh /these international money launderers. So, it’s all a ruse or a demonstration of gross incompetence. What Fred the Fed Wyshak, the CIA, the FBI, NSA, the IRS are doing is Showboating, going after a few bad guys, making a big show of it, and telling we citizens to “Screw off”? Why because they think we’re stupid, they think they’re the elite,, and they think we’ll swallow all the home grown (CIA. FBI. NSA. + State Cop, Local Cop propaganda.) Why do they lie about problems on the Mexican Border, about Benghazi, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Drug Overdose Epidemics (Remember Vietnam? Talk about lies about Drugs and the Gulf of Tonkin) and Afghan Drug Lords increasing their Opium production by 1,000 percent (10x) AFTER the US Marines first invaded (Taliban had cut production by 90%)???? They lie because we the American citizens let them lie to us. We know there are many great people, hard working in Federal Service. But we also know the FEDS by and large have become elitists, who make more than us, think their better than us, and oftentimes try to con and propagandize us, to feather their own nest.
(2) Even though I’m a staunch political/social Conservative, Jim, I would not impeach PRESIDENT OBama. I think he’s doing his best to minimize US involvement in Middle East Military Ventures, as Ike did. I WOULD IMPEACH WAR MONGERS LIKE MCCAIN AND ALL WHO GENUFLECT AT THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: Today, I call it the MAGC complex (pronounced Majesty: the Imperialists in the Media, in Academia, in Government and in Corporations (not all, but far too many) think and act like the Imperialists of old who we’ve been warned about since Wshington and since Truman, Ike, Graham Greene, Kennedy, and Reagan, and the entire 1970s Peace Movement came on the scene. (A lot of the hippies had balls.)
3 Stop Big FED (the corrupt imperial actors within the FEDs like McCain.); Stop Academic Hostility to Thought and Academics selling their souls to the FEDs for grants; Stop Big Media (a closed shop like academia acting hand in Glove with the FEDS to perpetuate propaganda to increase their profiles and salaries and commmissons; The MEDIA by an large is the propaganda arm of the FEDs. Stop the Big International Government Arms Merchants and Drug Runners (Banks) who work hand in glove with the FEDS to protect and spread drug supply routes, sell their arms, sell their other primary and secondary products and prosper on the backs and over the bodies of US Servicemen and Servicewomen; By and Large their God is Money and Profits, and they don’t give a damn about the American Citizen except those who live on Wall Street and in and around Washington D.C.; think that General Electric made $13 Billion Dollars in Profits and paid how much in taxes? That’s right GE the friends of Washington/Wall Street Insiders paid ZERO in TAXES. ZERO. Remember the Acronym for the Four Horses of the Apocalypse: Ike’s M.I. Complex metastasis to become the M.A.G.C. COMPLEX.
5. NATO HAS BECOME NAPOLEONIC; THE U.S. HAS BECOME IMPERIALISTIC; THE MEDIA HAS BECOME A PROPAGANDA ARM OF THE NEW AMERICAN POLICE STATE; AND CORPORATE AMERICA HAS TURNED ITS BACK ON AMERICAN CITIZENS;
6 When was the last time you heard that the FEDs, or FRED the FED Wyshak, or anyone in the DEA, FBI, whole DOJ, or the whole executive branch, put on a SHOW, a BIG Media Production, a Big Media-Academia-Government-Corporate Program, for the Six O’clock News, showing the arrest of the top 1,000 top drug traffickers in America or the World? Don’t hold you’re breath! It’s only the mid-level or lower rung dealer who ever gets arrested. Never the Financers, the Wholesale Marketers, the Major Distributors. Why? Because the 1,000 major traffickers at the top have everyone paid off! And oftentimes the payoffs are legal. They hire Big Time D.C. Lobbyists to protect them. An McCain and Kerry have done what about heroin trafficking these last 40 year? Nothing? Why?
MATT, AS YOU MENTIONED, KHATTALA, THE STUPID NARCISSIST THAT HE MUST BE, WAS ALWAYS AVAILABLE AT LOCAL BENGHAZI POPULAR SPOTS FOR A REPORTER’S INTERVIEW, YET THE SPECIAL FORCES, CIA,FBI ETC. SAID THEY COULD NOT LOCATE HIM. THIS WENT ON FOR TWO YEARS OR MORE. PERHAPS IF AN FBI AGENT POSED AS A FAMOUS JOURNALIST HE COULD HAVE BEEN EASILY CAPTURED.
HAS IT EVER OCCURRED TO YOU THAT NO ONE HAS MENTIONED THE WORD IMPEACH OR PERJURY DURING THIS TIME OF WASHINGTON CHAOS ?
I BELIEVE THE WORLD GOVERNMENTS ARE VERY MUCH AMUSED WITH OUR LEADERS DUE TO THEIR INCREDIBLE INEPTNESS.THE WHOLE SITUATION REMINDS ME OF A SHAKESPEAREAN QUOTE ” IT WAS A TALE TOLD BY IDIOTS FULL OF SOUND AN FURY SIGNIFYING NOTHING ”
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK, SEMPER FI, JIM AMBROSE