Tempest in a Chamberpot

The dishonesty, the idiocy, of the Republican attempt to make political hay out of the attack on the Benghazi consulate … beggars description.

Common sense tells you that, of course  anger at the scurrilous video (which we blogged about here) was a factor in motivating the attack on that consulate, as it was in the several other attacks throughout the Muslim world.  And of course, once things start shakin’ & bakin’ in the streets, all sorts of other elements will join the fun -- lads from the neighborhood, criminals looking to loot, Salafists and jihadis of every stripe -- perhaps even some AQIM.   To figure out what were the proportions of these various participants, is the painstaking task of the intelligence community, lasting days or weeks -- and not a particularly important task, compared with many others one could name, were one so inclined. 

Further, the idea that the Administration, for nefarious reasons of its own,

 (a) already knew, from Day 1, what normally you could know after days and weeks of analysis, and

 (b) suppressed the truth, because

 (c) they didn’t want you to know that al-Qaeda was involved (if indeed it was)

flies straight in the face of what we all know.   So far from having any interest whatsoever in minimizing the threat from AQ, this administration should  if anything  be tempted to exaggerate it.  After all, it’s Bush and the neocons who let Bin Ladin get away, and Obama and the boys who got ‘im -- and who have waged a far bolder and more relentless and effective drone campaign (among other efforts) against a by now seriously impaired al-Qaeda.  That the media dutifully follows the he-said/she-said of the political circus, is shameful.

Now, there is something about the Benghazi events that calls for inquiry:  namely, the level of security at the consulate.  --  Though again, an inquiry  not an Inquisition:   There are threats everywhere, around the world, and we had good reason to believe that, thanks to the wise and effective, limited targeted action of the Obama administration in aid of the insurrection that began in Benghazi and ultimately outsed Qaddhafi, the people of that city would be better disposed towards us than in many if not most other Muslim cities -- and indeed this was true, as witness the massive popular anti-terrorist protests that followed the attack on the consulate.

So:  the security.  A genuine issue, though not central given all the turmoil in that part of the world.   Did this Administration deliberately or negligently underprotect that facility?

Well, here’s what it says  in today’s  Washington Post:

In an opening statement shortly after the hearing began at midday, the top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.) , charged that House Republicans last year cut the Obama administration’s request for diplomatic security funding by hundreds of millions of dollars.

NPR this morning stated a more namby-pamby version of the same charge, omitting the startlingly-high figure.

Serious business!  Yet buried in the body of the article, when -- if true -- it should be the headline.

Well -- is it true?  It sounds implausible, given all the Republican bluster about maintaining defense spending  --though often all they really mean is:  Keep funding the useless pork projects in my district (this, after all, is the party that sent our soldiers into Iraq with underarmored Humvees).  But the facts should be easy to check.  And the fact that the newspaper did not have the courage to check the facts and state the fact, but left the thing hanging as a possibly purely partisan allegation, is craven journalism. 

If Cummings is lying -- call him on it!  But if he is telling the truth, then the hypocrite schemers and scammers   that are trying to leverage these sad events to their own benefit,

should have a taste of an old-fashioned,

but very American remedy:

Tar them and feather them,

and ride them out of town on a rail …

[Update 11 October 2012]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-letting-us-in-on-a-secret/2012/10/10/ba3136ca-132b-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_print.html

When House Republicans called a hearing in the middle of their long recess, you knew it would be something big, and indeed it was: They accidentally blew the CIA’s cover.   The purpose of Wednesday’s hearing of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee was to examine security lapses that led to the killing in Benghazi last month of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others. But in doing so, the lawmakers reminded us why “congressional intelligence” is an oxymoron.

Through their outbursts, cryptic language and boneheaded questioning of State Department officials, the committee members left little doubt that one of the two compounds at which the Americans were killed, described by the administration as a “consulate” and a nearby “annex,” was a CIA base. They did this, helpfully, in a televised public hearing.

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~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update 13 October 2012]  The depths to which this pseudo-debate is sinking, is illustrated by the following:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/romney-says-white-house-is-doubling-down-on-denial-about-libya-attack/2012/10/12/f099fd20-14a0-11e2-bf18-a8a596df4bee_story.html?hpid=z1

Whether the administration has truthfully disclosed what it knew about the perpetrators of the attacks became a flash point in Thursday night’s debate, when Vice President Biden blamed the administration’s shifting explanations on U.S. intelligence agencies.

Whether the Administration is “doubling down” (whatever that would mean in this case), the Romneyryanosaur is betting the farm on dumbing down -- and seeing their investment pay off,  with the aid of a gullible public and a cringing media.  Once again, we’ll put on our linguistic cap, and focus on that verb, blame.  There is a rhetorical game going on here, which have to do, not with any bald assertion, but with smuggled assumptions.  Thus, in this essay,

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-debates-psychoanalysis.html

we did a presuppositional analysis of Romney’s statement

       “I want to continue to burn clean-coal”

(here italics denote sentence-stress).  In this case, the hidden presupposition is smuggled in prosodically, rather than lexically; in the mealy-mouthed sentence quoted from the Washington Post, the presupposition is inherent in the semantics/pragmatics of the verb.   (For additional such rhetorical analysis of smuggled assumptions, click here:  Enthymeme Alert.)

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Certain verbs carry inherent assumptions, beyond the propositional statement that alone is subject to straightforward, up-or-down truth-value assessment.  Thus consider:

   (P) They ascribed/assigned responsibility for the outcome to John.

If John was indeed responsible for the outcome, then the ascription was true; false otherwise.  As to the nature of the outcome, nothing is asserted or assumed.

But now consider (Q):

   (Q) They blamed John for the outcome / They blamed the outcome on John.

This proposition is more complex.  It implies (P), and thus is subject to the same truth-conditions (if John had nothing to do with the outcome, then they blamed amiss);  but now there is an additional proposition  (Q’), which is not an implication of (Q) in the same sense that (P) is, but is presupposed by (Q), which along that dimension is subject, not to truth conditions, but to what linguists call felicity conditions:

   (Q’)  The outcome was bad.

If (Q’) is false, we are rhetorically in a pickle:  (Q) does not thereby become straightforwardly false;  rather, it is corrupted at the core.   Sneaking in false presuppositions is a particularly slimy maneuver, and one difficult to seize for the linguistically unsophisticated.  The classic example of this is that prosecutorial classic,  “Have you stopped beating your wife?”  When the defendant makes a move to protests that he never beat her in the first place -- or, more fundamentally, that he has never even been married -- the prosecutor cuts him off with a Romneyesque wave of the hand.  “Just answer the question, please:  It is a simple yes-or-no question.  Just answer Yes or No.”

Now consider

   (R)  They credited John with the outcome / They gave John the credit for the outcome.

Here the truth-conditions for the ascription remain as before;  and now there is also a presupposition, but it is the contrary of (Q’)

   (R’)  The outcome was good.

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In this light, let us revisit that sentence from the Washington Post:

Vice President Biden blamed the administration’s shifting explanations on U.S. intelligence agencies.

This one’s a presuppositional doozer.   The choice of words is that of the newspaper, but the view it describes is attributed to Biden.   The implicit implications are:

Both the Post reporter, and the Vice President, hold to the following propositions:

(i) The evolution in the understanding of the Benghazi attack  is a bad thing;

(ii) In fostering this evolution, the IC has been doing a bad thing.

Whereas in fact, it is a good thing that increasing light is beyond shone on these dark events; and our deepening understanding is thanks to careful work by intelligence professionals.

[Update 30 Oct 2012]
"While the State Department received many warnings on the troubling situation in Benghazi, none focused on the diplomatic compound that was attacked."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/world/middleeast/no-specific-warnings-in-benghazi-attack.html?ref=global-home

This is just one further instance of a general pattern that the Monday-morning finger-pointers  never get through their heads:  The IC constantly receives warnings, each more bizarre than the last, all over the globe.  Figuring out which to pursue and take seriously requires years of experience and depth of analysis, not knee-jerks.

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[Update 14 November 2012]  A couple of interesting readers’ comments:

Everyone on the right realizes why the WH has been vague about the Libya situation. The Prez can't talk freely because two of the victims were spies.  

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The Republicans basically exposed a clandestine operation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/11/14/how-obama-vs-mccaingraham-poisons-the-bipartisan-well/?hpid=z1