Foreign policy should not end like this... Transfer of remains of diplomats killed in Benghazi. Photo by state.gov DipNote.
State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters at the news briefing September 14 that until an FBI investigation was complete, no more comments would be made on the events in Benghazi, Libya where our ambassador and three Embassy staff people were killed:
I am going to frustrate all of you infinitely by telling you that now that we have an open FBI investigation on the death of these four Americans, we are not going to be in a position to talk at all about what the U.S. Government may or may not be learning about how any of this happened – not who they were, not how they happened, not what happened to Ambassador Stevens, not any of it – until the Justice Department is ready to talk about the investigation that it’s got. So I’m going to send you to the FBI on any of those kinds of questions, and they’re probably not going to talk to you about them while the investigation is open.
When a reporter asked, "Are you saying now that if there is something wrong with what was given out as correct information, it’s not going to be corrected because of the investigation...?" -- Nuland responded, ""I will make a personal pledge to you that if I become aware that information we gave that first night is radically wrong in a way that you deserve to know, I will do my best to get that information to you. But I have to respect the fact that this is now a crime scene."
Having closed of journalistic inquiry -- although of course some bloggers will continue to ask questions -- the Administration is now filling the gap with a key version of the story that may not be true: that the attacks were spontaneous, and not organized.
Today, Amb. Susan Rice said definitively -- before the FBI investigation was completed -- that the attacks were not premeditated. She then elaborated to the extent that we come back to... finding it was premeditated -- just by different people:
"We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to - or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo," Rice said. "And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons… And it then evolved from there."
As Jake Tapper of ABC reports reports, this is in direct contradiction to what Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf is saying: "It was planned, definitely, it was planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago, and they were planning this criminal act since their arrival," told CBS News.
Of course, Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch -- the same organization that was gushing about "reforms" in courting Gaddafi's "liberal" son at a press conference in Libya in 2009 -- claims that the Libyan leadership is just distracting from their own incompetence in rounding up militant groups and blaming it on remaining Qaddafi supporters. Malinowski blames instead Salafists but even more, blames the new Libyan governnment more for not reining them in.
I'm hardly persuaded by this claim because the battle against Qaddafi was long and hard and his supporters could remain. Qaddafi was reported to cooperate with Al Qaeda and recruit suicide bombers for Iraq and that connection could still be in place. Of course, the rebels have always rejected the idea that Al Qaeda was behind anything in Libya, because it was discredited their authentic uprising, but there's no need for us to accept these narratives as all-encompassing truths. Interestingly, Firedoglake took Malinowski's claim about the Libyan government's distractive claims to indicate the attack was pre-planned -- now that this notion is being spun by the Obama Administration, will FDL change its line, too?
In fact, it's a deadly miscalculation to believe that there were only pure democrats fighting for freedom, they won, and now there are no more forces lurking around to undo it, whether fellow rebels with a beef, Qaddafi supporters, Al Qaeda agents or otherwise. There are forces that have killed our diplomats! We need to keep an open mind on examining this situation and not adopt the arrogant scorn of the Beltway on analyzing these events.
I can see why the Administration has immediately become wedded to the "spontaneity" idea -- because if were a planned attack, then that would mean they might have done more to prevent it. A lot of focus has gone on the lightly-guarded US compound without any US marines, but Nuland is right that for a consulate outside the capital, this might have been "normal" enough, although the sense that it was a "rebel-held" capital might have added to the false sense of a lack of threat.
Amb. Rice, in articulating the line as it has likely come in cables, is conceding that behind the spontanteous outbursts were those who "hijacked" what is implied as an angry but non-violent or at least non-lethal - demonstration. But hijacking takes planning...
And one indication we have about something being very wrong in this situation comes, from all places, the game chat of Sean Smith in the hours before his death. As every news article and obiturary has noted, Sean was an avid player of EVE Online. EVE is an intricate game of strategy and deceit whose developer once said with a twinkle in his eye at a conference I attended at New York Law School on virtual worlds and games, "We make fraud fun."
EVE Online is intensively demanding and difficult and a notorious time-suck and even cult. And interestingly, it's the only online game or world where a players' council that interacts in a form of democracy with the game developers has actually worked successfully. Sean Smith, known as "Vile Rat" in the game and also playing the role of a diplomat for his Goonswarm alliance, was on that council. He also attended the Fanfest or gamers' convention for EVE -- that shows he was even more heavily involved in this intensive community than the typically obsessed player.
My first question -- one asked only by a few other people on various forums, and always only by women -- is why Sean Smith was playing EVE online or at least chatting to EVE buddies at work -- even if not during work hours -- and chatting about security matters.
You cannot possibly know who is in those games as the avatars are all anonymous. And speaking of Anonymous, many of them got their start on the Something Awful forums where Sean was a moderator.
People are loathe to ask these questions in the shock of the news of our fallen heroes, and I totally understand that, but it is a question that inspectors have to ask. The FBI must get his game chat transcripts from EVE or from Jabber or Skype as they are matters of national security.
What stood out chillingly for me are the last words of Sean on September 11, 2012 as recorded by his EVE buddy The Mittani, which he and his fellow EVE mates seem only to evaluate on the level of a marker for being in a dangerous situation:
(12:54:09 PM) vile_rat: assuming we don't die tonight. We saw one of our 'police' that guard the compound taking pictures
But what this line tells us, for anyone familiar with embassies and consulates abroad, is that Sean Smith did not feel as if he could trust the Libyans guarding him. He used the word "police" in scare quotes. He apparently didn't believe they were acting like real police. That could mean they were incompetent, or that he couldn't be sure they were on the right side -- and I think probably the latter.
And that's because in the next phrase, he said they were taking pictures. Why were people guarding a compound stopping and taking pictures of that compound -- oh, like Iranian spies caught taking pictures of the Midtown Tunnel or something?
Could it be because they were helping those who were later coming to attack the compound in a planned attack by showing them the layout of buildings? Could this seemingly simple game chat from Vile Rat with his game buddy contain a clue of a planned attack.
Are those Libyan guards being interrogated and are any of them under arrest?
Of course, they could have been taking pictures like tourists or trying out their new Instagram apps. But it's more likely they were taking them for a purpose -- a purpose that stood out for Sean and made him comment -- and it was part of the uneasy signals from his environment that made Sean Smith say "assuming we don't die tonight."
The way the news stories went, it seemed as if he typed that line in chat, then typed "FUCK GUNFIRE" in the next line and was never heard from again.
I got the idea that all these chat lines came later at night, right before the attack -- at 9:30 pm or 10:00 pm. But the game chat is time-stamped 12:54:09 PM. Is that the time-stamp of a game player located in the US? Or Iceland? Tripoli is two hours ahead of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, where EVE online's company is located. Games are often set to the time of their physical developers' locations. That means when it is 12:54 pm in Reykjavik, it is 2:54 pm in Tripoli, or about 7 hours before the 10 pm attack. Game time could be irrelevant here, however, if the two men were only chatting on Jabber, a chat program for game fans to use outside the game itself.
And later the tweet by Sean Smith's buddy The Mittani is time-stamped 4:27 pm the next day, September 12, but referencing a Reuters story on September 11, datelined 9:12 pm GMT or 11:12 pm in Tripoli (Libya is 2 hours ahead of GMT):
Joys of #eveonline: one of my directors is stationed in Benghazi, goes 'oh shit gunfire' on jabber, then we see this: http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL5E8KBMI220120911 …
The Mittani doesn't tell us in his obituary the date stamp of his friends actual last words, he just says:
He was on jabber when it happened, that’s the most fucked up thing. In Baghdad the same kind of thing happened - incoming sirens, he’d vanish, we’d freak out and he’d come back ok after a bit. This time he said ‘FUCK’ and ‘GUNFIRE’ and then disconnected and never returned.
When?
It seems likely that if Sean heard gunfire, it must have been right at the moment of the attack? Or was there any gunfire earlier in the day?
BTW, The Mittani -- a controversial personage in the EVE fan base charged with serious cyber-bullying and investigated by CCP, the makers of EVE, is furious that Mitt Romney is "trying to politicize the death of his friend," yet even before he began eulogizing his friend, like any normal goon evidently not overly concerned about blaspheming the president, he said:
@j_smedley I'm afraid that when we find out the details of what happened we will become blind with rage. How many guards did they have?
Indeed.
So Sean could have been chatting on his lunch hour or after hours late in the evening - and not necessarily intensively playing the game that in fact he had somewhat withdrawn from, as he stepped down from the players' council in EVE's star chambers. He could have Jabber tabbed out in one window while he multi-tasked.
The question is why, if he saw the Libyan guards acting strangely, as information officer, he didn't alert the department of security, or even send a cable to Washington. But an information officer's duties even in this war setting, and even as a former military man, would not necessarily include reporting on the scene and its worrisome factors, when the job duties were more about making statements of US policy and news of the post's activities.
It sounds like a fantastic science fiction novel, doesn't it? A third-rate hate video gets uploaded and has help going "viral" and gets rebroadcast on powerful and influential Egyptian TV, and it ends in the death of a gamer who is a virtual diplomat in a world of shifting and treacherous alliances in a grim outer space. Nobody wants to blame the Internet for anything. They could this time.
It's clear that Sean Smith was inured to danger, and his game buddies even bragged about how he told them of his dangerous assignments, which added to his allure -- it's typical in these anonymous virtual scenes that people use the coin of real life or "RL" as it is known to trump game-acquired skills and amplify them. Through the acceleration and amplification of virtuality, somebody who is an information officer can become Kissinger or Brahimi.
Sean was a hero for accepting this dangerous assignment and walking into harm's way to help both his country and the Libyan people. He was a military man skilled in assessing situations. So we need to take his seasoned instincts seriously, and ask why Sean wrote negatively of those Libyan police, and why and what else he saw. But we also have to ask why he discussed this so casually with a game buddy, and why he reported it in chat or in a game, but not to the security in his compound.
Of course, I'll be the first to say this is a rather obscure line of inquiry, when you also have American and Libyan eyewitnesses in real life, ballistics reports, fire department and police reports, and everything else that the FBI is now looking at.
But I'm not liking the left's effort to chill any debate around this national tragedy that occurred, truly as if planned, on September 11, exploiting the good will and active participation of dedicated foreign service officers, Amb. Chris Stevens and his staff.
As if they participate in some heavily ritualistic religion that forbids ever speaking of the dead or criticizing national leaders when deaths have occurred abroad, Obama administration officials and their avid supporters in the press and blogosphere have been scolding Romney and any others raising questions as if they've committed, well, blasphemy.
Nonsense. When Americans die abroad in this brutal and startling away right in their supposedly untouchable consulate, truly we need to ask questions, and the president and his foreign policy record aren't off limits. When statements like the US Embassy made in Cairo are coming out to supposedly "manage" the situation, and don't work and a conflagration occurs, indeed we do get to ask about the entire Middle Eastern policy of Obama and how he has handled the Arab Spring -- which has, in fact, since 2009 in the Cairo speech, but a question of accentuating guilt, exhibiting deference to unpredictable forces, and scant on human rights universals.
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