More Evidence of Inexplicable Laxness in American Security Abroad — CNN, not the State Department or U.S. Military, Found Ambassador’s Stevens’ “Journal” in the Benghazi Consulate Where He and Three Others Were Murdered

© 2012 Peter Free

 

24 September 2012

 

 

When reporters beat you to the scene of your own defeat, you know you’ve got a severe security problem

 

Untwist this puzzler:

 

The State Department – in a harsh, detailed statement – is accusing CNN of an “indefensible” invasion of the privacy of Christopher Stevens, the late U.S. ambassador to Libya, after finding his seven-page journal in the consulate where he was killed.

 

CNN fired back by saying that the State Department may be “attacking the messenger” because of “questions about why the State Department didn’t do more to protect Ambassador Stevens.”

 

CNN.com reported on Saturday:

 

“Four days after he was killed, CNN found a journal belonging to late U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens. The journal was found on the floor of the largely unsecured consulate compound where he was fatally wounded. CNN notified Stevens’ family about the journal within hours after it was discovered and at the family’s request provided it to them via a third party. The journal consists of just seven pages of handwriting in a hard-bound book.”

 

© 2012 Mike Allen, State Department: CNN 'indefensible' on late ambassador Christopher Stevens's diary, Politico (23 September 2012) (paragraph split and reformatted)

 

 

Think about it — Department of State is complaining about something that its own incompetence led to happening

 

Let’s leave aside the morality and legality of airing a murdered Ambassador’s thoughts, during the immediate aftermath of a national security incident.

 

Focus, instead, on the fact that the State Department was apparently so lax that:

 

(a) it allowed foreseeably aroused terrorists to murder Ambassador Christopher Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen A. Doherty,

 

and

 

(b) it then reacted so slowly that an international news organization beat its officers to rummaging through the scene of the deaths four days afterward.

 

In sum, the Department of State and (presumably) U.S. military were proactively and reactively slower than brain-dead molasses.

 

But not so brain-dead that the Department didn’t rouse itself enough to cry foul against a private entity that had indirectly exposed its (apparently) awe-inspiring incompetence.

 

 

The moral? — the United States is on a roll of murderously dangerous stupidity

 

As I have recently pointed out, here and here.