Preserving Disorder

Every time the Obama administration feels that it is or might become unpopular it launches a campaign to get the name Al Queda in the news as often as possible and the media, of course, is happy to oblige. CBS Evening News has been on a real binge since the government shutdown, even though Obama is blaming the Republicans for it.

Last night they were celebrating the twenty-year anniversary of “Blackhawk Down,” complete with a “never before seen” film clip, and said that the mission was about capturing an “Al Queda affiliated warlord” in Mogadishu, which is an awesomely stupid and/or dishonest statement.

Whatever Mohamed Farrah Aidid was, he most certainly was not in any way affiliated with Al Queda or in sympathy with its goals. He was a Somali national, educated in the Soviet Union, who rebelled against the then Somali king and declared himself to be the head of the new Somali government. He was one of several vying in violent and bloodthirsty conflict for that role.

As a point of interest, he and his fellow warlords were later overthrown by the Islamic Courts Union, despite the fact that the United States was actively backing the warlords. Wait, we were backing the warlords after the “Blackhawk Down” incident?

Well, Aidid was dead by that time, so the conflict was less than it might have been, but it was still a bit odd. We claimed the ICU was harboring Al Queda, which it almost certainly was not. And this was another proxy war that we lost, because the ICU prevailed and established a considerable degree of order in the nation, which had known none under the warlords.

Nonetheless, we wanted the ICU gone, so we prevailed upon Kenya and Nigeria to invade and depose them, and assisted them in that process, thereby restoring total disorder to Somalia and returning it to its previous status as a failed state. We excel at creating disorder. At any rate, that opened the door for Al Shabab, which certainly is an element of Al Queda, to enter the country so in addition to introducing Al Queda to Iraq we also introduced them to Somalia.

CBS Evening News did not, of course, report any of this. The only Al Queda they mentioned in Somalia was Aidid, whose name they did not use and who was not actually Al Queda.

On Wednesday they ran a piece which was supportive of the war on whistleblowers, but which was also utterly incoherent.

It began, innocently enough, by blaming the New York Times for damaging the “war against terrorists” by reporting on the conversation within Al Queda which was intercepted and which led to the shutdown of nineteen American embassies. That link, CBS says, “went silent” as soon as the Times article appeared, and so the intelligence agencies lost a valuable asset.

They then said that “the material stolen by Snowden is almost certainly in the hands of the Chinese and the Russians,” and declaimed at great length about how damaging that is to our ability to deter terrorists from dropping a nuclear bomb on New York City. Haha, take that New York Times.

Okay, I made up the part about the nuclear bomb, but what does publication of one event by the Times have to do with unpublished documents taken six months earlier? And why is possession of those documents by China and Russia harmful? Are they suggesting that either of those nations sponsors terrorism? Or that they will pass the information on to terrorists?

Russia, at least, is actually working with us to stop terrorists. Does no one recall that some time back they notified us that a couple guys were headed our way who might be terrorists and we ignored them? The upshot of that was that the two guys set off bombs at the Boston Marathon, and I don’t recall any real words of praise about how Russians were such good guys for trying to prevent the tragedy.

Anyway, they kept condemning anyone who is willing to tell us what the government is doing. It was kind of ironic watching the news media saying that the news media should not report the news.