Americans at Risk

When did it become acceptable for the sitting administration in Washington to make political decisions to kill Americans? When did the media decide to allow this to happen without a word of dissent? What is happening to our society that there isn't a general uprising among the populace calling for the resignations and impeachments of those responsible?

There are three things in the news over the past four years that I find extremely troubling. The first of course is "Fast and Furious". For anyone who has been living in a cave lately, that was the government's plan to allow firearms to be bought in quantity and shipped into Mexico to the drug cartels. They were to be tracked to locate where these weapons were going. The problem is that nobody in the government bothered to track them. Many people were murdered using these weapons. Ultimately a United States Border Patrol agent was gunned down. His murderer was just convicted.

For three years the Obama administration has been trying to stonewall this, denying responsibility and claiming executive privilege . The blame was pushed onto low level ATF agents. Members of the House of Representatives persevered, with little or no help from the press, and slowly brought out that the scandal went beyond ATF into the Justice Department itself. Again, slowly but surely, more information has shown that it goes much higher in the chain of command. Possibly right into the office of the Attorney General himself.

The second and equally troubling program for killing Americans goes right into the oval office. There has been some small amount of publicity about the President's "Kill List". Apparently the President maintains a list of evil doers on foreign soil that he, using armed drones, can put in his sights and blow them to smithereens by remote control. That is, even if these evil doers are American citizens. It strikes me that there is something terribly un-American about this. We always used to send the CIA or some military Special Operations Group out the capture these people and question them. Perhaps getting additional intel to further the "War on Terror". Now we just blow them into tiny pieces and walk away.

My final example and the one I find most troubling is Benghazi. I have written a great deal about Benghazi both in this blog and in "comments" to on-line news articles. Most of the media hasn't learned to spell Benghazi apparently. If you want coverage you have to go to Fox News. They have been on top of it from the beginning and have done a commendable job.

The US Ambassador to Libya and three other American heroes were killed on American soil inside the American consulate for what I believe were political reasons. They were attacked by an Al Qaeda franchise group. They called for aid three times. That help never arrived even though they could have had an AC-130 Specter gunship there in one hour. The battle lasted seven hours.

The administration handed out dumb cover-up  stories. They tried to sell that it was just a mob action with no organization. That they didn't have enough information from the drone overhead and boots on the ground. In my opinion, they didn't want to send help because it would give lie to the administrations story that Libya was a success and everything is normalizing. There are rumors floating as I write this of e-mails from the White House ordering a "stand down" on rescue operations.

There you have it. Americans dead on our own and on foreign soil for no reason other than political expediency. The press has been ignoring it or belittling it. But there are those of us out here in the blogo-sphere that take these thing seriously and feel their importance. I know the I and those like me reach a small audience. But if enough of us keep trying, I like to think we can make a difference. The public needs to be reminded on occasion that the government is far from perfect and needs constant watching.