The Patriot Post® · Benghazi is the Rule, Not the Exception

One of the primary questions being asked about the Benghazi debacle – by those in the mainstream media whose first calling isn’t protecting the president at all costs – is why the four Americans who were killed were so vulnerable to attack. The answer to that question is obvious: the political philosophy that animates this administration inevitably trumps events on the ground, no matter how many “bumps in the road,” or “not optimal” outcomes, as president Obama has characterized them, arise as a result. Yet last week, two other stories that deserve far wider dissemination than they will ever receive, illuminate just how deep the ideological rot has penetrated. Benghazi is critically important – but far more revealing are the twin circuses surrounding the trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Nidal Malik Hasan.

First, it worth remembering that if the Obama administration had proceed as they originally wished, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would have been tried in a civilian court in New York City. Why? For the same reason Barack Obama and his minions, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, were busy hawking the Benghazi-inducing, “offensive video” lie until it could no longer be sustained. For the same reason video-maker Mark Basseley Youssef still remains in jail without bail, even as the excuse for that detention wears perilously thin. In short, this administration is determined to show a horde of Islamic savages that they are as sensitive to religious disrespect and perceived injustice as the savages themselves are.

Thus, it is completely unsurprising that the pre-trial motions taking place in this case resemble a Monty Python farce. It began Monday when presiding judge, Army Col. James Pohl, ruled that the defendants were not required to attend the hearings, after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed decided he wished to boycott the proceedings. Two of the other four defendants, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsaw and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, followed suit. Prosecutors argued that the rules of military tribunals require such attendance, but it seems Col. Pohl was more attuned to the defense attorney arguments that the threat of forcible removal from their cells would be psychologically damaging for men who had been “brutalized” by the CIA in secret overseas prisons, prior to their imprisonment at Guantanamo in 2006.

It went downhill from there. Pohl then granted a request by the defendants to wear camouflage clothing in court if they wanted, over-ruling the prison commander’s prohibition on such nonsense. In other words, Pohl was more than willing to legitimize KSM’s desire to show up dressed as a “prisoner of war,” as his lawyer, Army Capt. Jason Wright, put it, because KSM is entitled to “wear the same type of uniform he wore while fighting for the U.S.-supported Mujahedeen in Afghanistan and in Bosnia,” the attorney contended.

Insulted yet? If not, Pohl was up to the task of getting you there with one more ruling: he granted KSM’s request to have court break an hour early, letting out at 4 p.m. “because of the early hour the accused are awakened,” said Pohl who once again succumbed to the b.s. flung in his direction by KSM’s lawyer. “For Mr. Mohammed, the worst thing about sleep deprivation in the present is that it will almost inevitably trigger a re-traumatization and re-triggering of the sleep-deprivation torture techniques inflicted upon him in the past at the hands of other American guards,” reprised his attorney.

Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles Burlingame, piloted American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon, asked the most relevant question. “How can you give so much respect to a man responsible for the death of thousands of men, women and children?” she wondered. The answer is as simple as it is horrific: when one embraces the political correctness that forms the core of progressive ideological bankruptcy, all such insults – and more – are possible.

Yet such insults pale in comparison to the machinations taking place behind the scenes with respect to the massacre at Fort Hood in 2009. Note I said behind the scenes. In the forefront is the reality that this trial has yet to begin, despite the fact that Nidal Malik Hasan executed 13 people and wounded 29, while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” almost three years ago.

The reason for that is obvious: absolutely nothing about this crime, or the the ideologically-driven ineptness leading up to it, accrues to a president desperately determined to have his foreign policy failures ignored leading up to the election. Not the fact that Hasan was a known radical with ties to American-born terrorist leader Anwar al-Awlaki. Not the fact that the president offered up a “shout out” during a Tribal Nations Conference meeting of Native American leaders, before getting around to mentioning the massacre. Not the fact that the Army’s top officer at the time, former Gen. George Casey, was more concerned about “greater tragedy” regarding military diversity, than he was about dead troops.

The latest delay in this trial was caused by the same kind of PC-inspired inanities that animate the KSM trial: Hasan refused to shave for his appearance in court. He had grown a beard “as an expression of his Muslim faith,” according to his lawyers. Beards violate Army regulations, and Fort Hood’s chief circuit judge, Col. Gregory Gross, had refused to allow Hasan in the courtroom as a result. Hasan’s lawyers appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, and won a stay. It took until last week for the appeals court to rule that Hasan must follow the aforementioned military regulations.

Yet behind the scenes, the Obama administration has made an utter mockery of anything resembling military regulations. The first insult was the ludicrous decision to label the massacre “workplace violence.” And once again, it goes downhill form there. Kudos to PJMedia’s Bridget Johnson for doing the work the mainstream media refuses to do, exposing the despicable manipulations of an Obama administration bereft of common sense and common decency. Before the $642.5 billion National Defense Authorization Act was passed, it was threatened with a presidential veto if certain items remained in the bill. Here is the relevant item:

“The Administration objects to section 552, which would grant Purple Hearts to the victims of the shooting incidents in Fort Hood, Texas, and Little Rock, Arkansas,” the veto threat stated. “The criminal acts that occurred in Little Rock were tried by the State of Arkansas as violations of the State criminal code rather than as acts of terrorism; as a result, this provision could create appellate issues.” (Fyi, the Little Rock provision refers to a case in which Muslim convert and avowed jihadist, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, killed one soldier and wounded another in a drive-by shooting at a military recruiting office. He pleaded guilty to murder to avoid the death penalty, and is currently serving a life sentence).

The Obama administration’s rationale? “The victims of the Fort Hood massacre are not eligible for the Purple Heart, because the attack is not considered to have been made by the enemy, or an ‘international terrorist attack,’” writes Dana Pico at the Death Before Dishonor website. “The Department of Defense seemingly does not want to consider Major Nidal Malik Hasan as acting as part of the enemy, because that might bring all Muslim soldiers under suspicion of being considered the enemy.”

Need more evidence of ideological bankruptcy? Because the administration steadfastly refuses to call what Hasan did an act of terrorism, neither the dead victims relatives, nor the soldiers wounded in the shooting, are eligible for the same level of benefits soldiers in a combat zone receive.

In a better world all, of the above would be hoisted front and center before the American public in these last days leading up to the election. Unfortunately, the number of Obama-protecting Candy Crowley types in the mainstream media far outnumber the truth-diggers like Bridget Johnson and Dana Pico.

Here’s hoping Mitt Romney comes armed to tonight’s debate with more ammunition than the Benghazi fiasco. If Romney mention theses two trials and the administration’s orchestrations behind them, that would be a great start. Equally deserving of exposure is the recent change in orders that now require our troops to carry loaded weapons around their armed Afghan trainees. 40 deaths were the price our fighting forces paid – this year alone – when some of those Afghan trainees turned their weapons on their unarmed American trainers, who were disarmed as part of a policy aimed at “winning the trust’” of those trainees. In short, the public desperately needs to know that, as bad as Benghazi is, it is by no means an exception to the worldview that informs this administration. It is just another piece in a pattern of consistency.

A degenerate, duplicitous and despicable consistency.