It was given away by Obama to the international Communist/Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy.
This is obvious to anyone who can read.
Of course, this excludes Feinstein and Other Monsters (D).
Today is a good day to die.
I didn't say for whom.
Posted on 02/04/2011 12:04:52 PM PST by Qbert
The debate over who “lost” Egypt seems to have begun.
Critics are openly questioning the quality of information and analysis given to President Barack Obama by U.S. intelligence agencies in the days leading to the dramatic uprising against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. And they are raising questions about the effectiveness of his efforts to force the 82-year-old strongman to step down.
Administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, admit that some mistakes were made and some signals were missed. And, even as they frantically try to negotiate Mubarak’s departure and avert more violence, they argue that their options and leverage would have been limited even had Obama been warned long in advance of the unrest that would sweep Egypt.
But on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) pointedly challenged analysts over the quality of information Obama was given in the days leading up to the uprising.
“The president, the secretary of state and the Congress are making policy decisions on Egypt, and those policymakers deserve timely intelligence analysis,” Feinstein said.
“I have doubts whether the intelligence community lived up to its obligations in this area.”
And Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), another member of the panel, suggested there would be more questions to come. “The whole question of Egypt and what we knew when is critical … I am interested in when the president was told how serious this was,” he said.
Administration officials admit they have often been caught chasing developments as the democratic wave in the Middle East, which began in Tunisia, sweeps across a region of autocrats with ties to the U.S. But they say that the changes are historic in scope and beyond their power to directly control, no matter how much information they are collecting.
“Did anyone in the world know in advance that a fruit vendor in Tunisia was going to light himself on fire and spark a revolution? No,” says National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor.
“But for decades the [the intelligence community] and State Department have been reporting on simmering unrest in the region that was the result of changing economic, demographic, and political conditions.”
At a tense Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, Central Intelligence Agency Associate Deputy Director Stephanie O’Sullivan faced bipartisan questioning about the CIA’s actions.
“The minute that things started earlier on in Tunisia, the intelligence community started looking at the long-term strategic impact,” said O’Sullivan, at what was supposed to be the confirmation hearing on her nomination to be principal deputy director of national intelligence.
“We will always do after-action looks to see if there was something more that we should have done as we look back.”
Under some pressure from inquiring senators, O’Sullivan alluded to a report in late 2010 of a potential for trouble in the area. “We have warned of instability. We didn’t know precisely what the triggering mechanism would be … that [warning] happened at the end of last year,” she said.
Still, the administration’s response has, at times, appeared to be halting, reactive and based on out-of-date information.
As the protests heated up last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially claimed Mubarak’s regime was stable — a position she quickly abandoned as the magnitude of the uprising became apparent.
Since then, Obama has moved steadily toward pushing Mubarak out the door — with the president pointedly telling the Egyptian leader that the time for a government “transition” was at hand. Late Thursday night, administration officials said a number of scenarios were under consideration, including one in which the military would form a caretaker government.
But Obama’s failure so far to dislodge Mubarak has prompted a wave of finger-pointing.
“If there were not a game plan for the end of Mubarak, an 82-year-old, very unpopular leader before now, there should have been, and they were slow off the mark, and they`re on the defensive now,” NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell said Wednesday night on MSNBC.
“It seemed a bit lumbering, a little bit passive and reactive, and I`m not saying it’s not extraordinarily complicated. They have to think about so many different audiences,” the veteran journalist declared.
“Could [Arab leaders] have been organized earlier to try to impress upon Mubarak that his legacy, his family name, his achievements — however he wants to view them — will depend on the way he leaves office, but that he has to leave and probably within the next couple of days to avoid further bloodshed?”
Could Obama and his team have done more if they had adequate information? Those answers aren’t likely to be answered until after the crisis has ended and the post-mortems have begun.
Yet many experts, even those who would like the White House to have been more supportive of the protesters more quickly, say they doubt it. And they add that what critics are describing as a flat-footed reaction may actually reflect an effort to accommodate various U.S. interests and address the harshly negative opinion of America in Egypt and many neighboring countries.
“In our politics, it’s a no-win situation,” said Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center.
“If [Obama] leans forward and then the revolution succeeds and the new government takes a less-friendly tone towards the U.S., he’ll be seen as the man who lost Egypt. If he tried to hold on to Mubarak, to be seen to have saved him or to not have done enough remove him and he stayed and became more ruthless, Obama would be accused of sticking by dictators. … You’re going to get it from both sides no matter what you do.”
Several Mideast experts described the obsession in some circles with what Obama should have done about the protests amounts to American navel-gazing that is all but irrelevant to the protesters who have imperiled Mubarak’s regime.
“Those folks in Tahrir Square are not waiting for us to sprinkle holy water on them, as difficult as it may be for some people to understand,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.
“It’s not a question of America being hated for supporting Mubarak. People are angry with Mubarak because he supported America. … There are limits to the role we can play in this situation. We’re not the guys in white hats riding over the horizon. No one in Egypt sees us playing that role.”
“In reality, the U.S. can make very little difference in what’s taking place in Egypt,” Telhami said, while acknowledging the U.S. has some leverage with the military to try to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.”
On Thursday, Mubarak and other officials were already suggesting that public comments by leaders of “friendly” countries, presumably including the U.S, amounted to unseemly and “unacceptable” meddling in Egypt’s business.
Mubarak told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that Obama’s suggestions to accelerate the handover of power reflected some ignorance about the situation in Egypt. “You don’t understand the Egyptian culture and what would happen if I step down now,” Mubarak said, according to ABC.
“There are some abnormal ways by which foreign countries have intervened through press declarations and statements. This was very strange, given the friendly relations between us and them,” new Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman said in an interview on state television Thursday. “The interference in our internal affairs is a weird thing.”
Obama’s defenders say that Mubarak himself was taken by surprise — and demonstrators were stunned at the swift pace of the revolt.
“It was rather quick, rather spontaneous and rather enormous. The demonstrators were as surprised as anyone with their initial success,” Zogby said.
“Nobody initially understood the implication of the early demonstrations. [Administration officials] were not the only ones,” said Telhami. “I didn’t expect this to become a revolution. No one did.”
One Egypt expert who’d like to see the administration stand more publicly and clearly on the side of the protesters counseled humility on the part of critics of the administration.
“I come down on the side of people who want a much stronger push and greater commitment from the administration to a more democratic process [but] they’re not idiots over there,” said Tarek Masoud, a native Egyptian and an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
“It’s sensible that there’s some debate about this. … From their perspective, there are a lot of unknowns. You open it up to the tumultuous democratic process and people you’re not comfortable with may end up seizing that process.”
Masoud said he thinks the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the unrest has been overstated, but that doesn’t mean that the U.S. has nothing at all to fear from the secular Egyptians who have challenged Mubarak’s rule in recent days.
“There are folks — leftists, Nasserists who are in the front lines — that hate America with every fiber of their being, just as much as any Muslim Brotherhood member does. … The administration has to be looking at the protesters thinking: is this really good for us? … I think this is actually more challenging than Iraq and harder to get right than Iraq. There are all kinds of unknowns.”
The ME is like a volcano.. you know pressure is building up. Will it vent noxious gas and smoke? A little ash? Or a full blown Krakatoa? Obama blaming the CIA while he undercuts Mubarak and supports the MB is ridiculous.
Bullcrap. Obama knew what was going on and has been collaborating with the instigators of this “revolution” since December 2008, if not earlier. But in typical Obama fashion, he failed to accomplish his objective this time by failing to handover Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood and his Iranian backers as planned.
Administration officials... some signals were missed.
Like the meetings the president did not attend and the reports he does not read?
CIA? No, CYA
A) The Muslim in Chief;
B) his media toads.
How hard is that to figure out?
“Like the meetings the president did not attend and the reports he does not read?”
Including the important meeting last Saturday that he chose not to attend (when he was watching hoops).
Plus, I found an article from last month that I posted a few days ago from Reuters where the Muslim Brotherhood specifically announced that they were going to organize a massive street protest and things were “going to rapidly escalate”. How hard could it be for this bumbling administration?
Did Bill Ayers and Obama’s other terrorist friends give the President bad information when they were there recently?
In typical fashion, they created or helped create the problem, now its about finding a way to place blame on their political opponents.
The CIA warned obam, the UN warned him, the World Food Bank warned him . He has no excuses he wanted this to happen. I thought leftists didn’t like intervention and there he is trying to intervene for the wrong side. ElBaradei is another Soro’s puppet.
lBaradei’s Ultimatum to Mubarak: 48 Hours to Leave the Country
“Egyptian uprising idol Mohammed ElBaradei has ordered Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave the country by Friday – or he will be a “dead man walking” and not just a lame-duck president.”
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/142095
El Baradei is hooked up with Soros/Brzezinski through the International Crisis Group. They condemned Mubarak right away by calls for the government to stop using violence against the protesters
http://www.crisisgroup.org/en.aspx
Did those liars lie to Nazi Pelosi again?
she was in charge there for the last 4 years.
What? no briefings on Egypt?
It was given away by Obama to the international Communist/Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy.
This is obvious to anyone who can read.
Of course, this excludes Feinstein and Other Monsters (D).
White House Insider: Obama is Clueless. Totally Clueless
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2668707/posts
According to this email, Obama is totally focused on getting re-elected in 2012.
Valerie Jarret, the White House resident communist, is evidently running things.
Just read apost on CNN...that N.Koreans are protesting in the streets for Kim to step down....will try to find confirmation of this...but Freepers might need to get on this too just in case truth.
From 1600 Penn. to El-Baradei, IRAN is in charge.
Just read apost on CNN...that N.Koreans are protesting in the streets for Kim to step down....will try to find confirmation of this...but Freepers might need to get on this too just in case truth.
This is what you get when Democrats are in office. Lots of in-your-face obnoxiousness and, when their screw-ups are so overwhelming that their pals in the state-run media can’t cover up for them, lots of finger-pointing and he-said, she-said. Of course, when the dust settles, they evade all responsibility for the disasters they leave behind, don’t apologize, and don’t admit that they made even a single mistake. Then they slink off-stage and wait till the next generation of gullible teenagers reaches voting age, and we’re off to the races once again.
-PJ
Who’s to blame? The d!psh!t squatting in public housing at 1600 Penn’a Ave.
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