Friday, September 14, 2012

Libya













NEW WAVE OF UNREST SWEEPS ISLAMIC WORLD

LIBYAN EMBASSY ATTACKED

AMBASSADOR STEVENS KILLED



 Film "Innocence of Mohammad" or "The Desert Warrior" has inflamed
the Islamic World.  Don't you just love to see our US flag!  It's the
most recognizable flag in the world.  People find so many uses for it!
 
*  All photos and art provided by "Google Images".
 
 

by Felicity Blaze Noodleman

 

 

Poor Libya!  The small, little and inflammatory nation which has reinvented itself under seven different flags since before 1911 in North Africa is in the news headlines again.  Why am I not surprised?  I mean really; a country which is this volatile deserves whatever may come their way.  This country seems to blow in the direction of the most profitable influences of the world at large. 

Now they are in the cradle of a Muslim Renaissance which is sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa and asserting their brand of Islam throughout the world and punctuating the Koran with the power of explosives led by groups like Al-Qaida.  These people seem to have a morbid taste for violence.  They just finished a revolution to depose their dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi and they now seem to be opting for their own version of the Islamic "dark ages".

 

I have to tell you, “I was really expecting something like this to happen now with our US Presidential election coming up”!  Isn’t it appalling that so many nations have become actively involved in one way or another with US politics. And they selected 9/11.  Aren't they clever.  In Libya’s case is it the politics of oil, weapons and most certainly blackmail.  It would be very profitable for them to get into a war with the US.  I always follow the money and what the money can buy.  In this case, it certainly is’t love.

 

The United States who is the most generous country in the world giving food, medical aid, “nation building”, disaster relief and military advisers when ever these services are needed, where ever in the world is being attacked by militant Muslims yet again because of a movie. There are a lot of movies I don’t like either but I don’t use it as an excuse for physical violence against whoever or whatever.

 

The real reason, as I’ve already mentioned seems to be the politics of oil and money along with decades of US policy involving foreign aid which has been lavished on these countries to purchase their friendship in the Middle East.  The politics of the world has changed radically and I really think they feel as though they are no longer going to be needed as they once were in the past.  Especially now that the US is such a huge budget crisis.

Maybe because of our budget crisis the United States should rethink how we carry out our diplomatic missions.  In today's world with the advances of telecommunications is there really a need to have a US embassy in every country in the world?  Most of the US diplomatic business could be accomplished by email, teleconferencing and telephone.  Also remember that we have the United Nations as an avenue for diplomacy with nations of the world. 

Therefor it is very reasonable to assume that maybe "Embassy's" have become a relic of the past.  Closing them would realize a huge savings in revenue for our government.  Only a few Embassy's in nations where the US is doing a lot of business might be necessary.  After all, our country has closed many military bases and installations around the world and here at home and down sized US forces.  I think this could work for embassy's as well.  Yes; that's it - they need a serious down sizing or as they say in business they need to be "right sized"!

 
I’ve assembled 4 news articles to be included for your consideration.  First is an article from CNN about the movie which has incited protests throughout the Islamic world and the bombing of the US Embassy in Bengasi, Libya and else where.  Two articles from the Washington Post (Sept. 12 & 14) describes the bombing and President Obama and Secretary Clinton’s response to the assaults against the embassy along with information reported on the fourth day of unrest throughout the region.  The forth article describes the unrest and protests of Muslims in the Islamic world from the New York Times.
 
 
 
 
 
Ambassador to Libya killed in attack of embassy in Bengasi, Libya. 
j. Christopher Stevens 
 
 
 
 
New details emerge of anti-Islam film's mystery producer
 
By Moni Basu, CNN
updated 1:54 PM EDT, Thu September 13, 2012
 
(CNN) -- Some time in the summer, a small theater in Los Angeles screened a movie to which hardly anyone came.
 
It was a clunky film filled with scenes in a desert and in tents. The characters were cartoonish; the dialogue gauche.
 
The actors who'd responded to a July 2011 casting call thought they were making an adventure film set 2,000 years ago called "Desert Warrior." That's how Backstage magazine and other acting publications described it.
 
The American-made movie, it turns out, was hardly an innocent Arabian Desert action flick.
 
Instead, the movie, backed by hardcore anti-Islam groups in the United States, is a tome on Islam as fraud. In trailers posted on YouTube in July, viewers saw this: scene after scene of the Prophet Mohammed portrayed as a womanizer, buffoon, ruthless killer and child molester.
 
Islam forbids all depictions of Mohammed, let alone insulting ones.
Staff and crew of film that ridiculed Muslims say they were 'grossly misled'
The Muslim world erupted in rage.
 
Protesters aired their anti-American anger in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, Iran Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories. They came after violent mobs attacked the U.S. Consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi leaving the ambassador and three other Americans dead.
 
But as outrage spread, the film's origins still remained murky. Whose idea was it? Who financed it?
 
At the heart of the mystery was the filmmaker himself, a man identified in the casting call as Sam Bassiel, on the call sheet as Sam Bassil and reported at first by news outlets as Sam Bacile.
 
But federal officials consider that man to be Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who was convicted in 2009 of bank fraud.
 
The FBI contacted the filmmaker because of the potential for threats, a federal law enforcement official told CNN Thursday. But he is not under investigation.
 
With media parked at is residence in Cerritos, California, Nakoula called the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Wednesday night to report a disturbance, said spokesman Steve Whitmore. He wanted local police to protect him.
 
When news of his movie first broke, the filmmaker identified himself as Sam Bacile and told the Wall Street Journal that he was a 52-year-old Israeli-American real estate developer from California. He said Jewish donors had financed his film.
But Israel's Foreign Ministry said there was no record of a Sam Bacile with Israeli citizenship.
 
"This guy is totally anonymous. At this point, no one can confirm he holds Israeli citizenship, and even if he did we are not involved," ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said.
 
A search by CNN of public records related to Bacile came up empty. A search of entertainment records turned up no previous mention of a Sam Bacile, and the directors and writers guilds had no listing for him.
 
CNN has not been able to speak with the filmmaker.
 
A production staff member who worked on the film in its initial stages told CNN that an entirely different name was filed on the paperwork for the Screen Actors Guild: Abenob Nakoula Bassely. A public records search showed an Abanob B. Nakoula residing at the same address as Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.
 
He believed the filmmaker was a Coptic Christian and when the two spoke on the phone during production, the filmmaker said he was in Alexandria, Egypt, raising money for the film. There has been a long history of animosity between Muslims and the minority Copts in Egypt.
 
Another staffer who worked on the film said he knew the producer as Sam Bassil. That's how he signed a personal check to pay staff.
 
The staffer said he was "99% positive" that Sam Bassil was not Jewish. He had quite a few religious pieces in his house, including images of the Madonna.
 
He was married with two children -- the daughter helped during production and even brought in lunch on a few occasions, the staffer said.
 
Neither staffer wanted to be identified for security reasons.
 
The U.S. Attorney's Office sent a copy of a 2009 indictment when CNN inquired about Sam Bassil. Those court documents showed the bank fraud conviction for Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.
 
Several other aliases -- Mark Basseley Youssef, Yousseff M. Basseley, Nicola Bacily and Malid Ahlawi -- were all listed as aliases in the indictment. Other court documents listed Thomas J. Tanas, Ahmad Hamdy and Erwin Salameh also as aliases.
 
Six things to know about the attack
 
In his interview with the Wall Street Journal, the filmmaker characterized his movie, now called "Innocence of Muslims," as "a political effort to call attention to the hypocrisies of Islam."
 
"Islam is a cancer," he said. "The movie is a political movie. It's not a religious movie."
An actress in the film, who asked not to be identified, told CNN that the original script did not include a Prophet Mohammed character. She said she and other actors complained that their lines had been changed.
 
She said she spoke Wednesday with the producer.
 
"He said he wrote the script because he wants the Muslims to quit killing," she said. "I had no idea he was doing all this."
 
She described the movie's repercussions as a "nightmare," given the outrage and deaths, and she regretted having a role. She said she was angry and hurt by the lies.
The 79 other cast and crew members said they were "grossly misled" about the film's intent.
 
YouTube restricts video access over Libyan violence
 
"The entire cast and crew are extremely upset and feel taken advantage of by the producer," they said in a statement.
 
They said they were "shocked by the drastic rewrites of the script and lies that were told to all involved. We are deeply saddened by the tragedies that have occurred."
 
The actress said that the character of Mohammed in the movie was named George when it was shot, and that after production wrapped she returned and read other lines that may have been dubbed into the piece.
 
A member of the production staff who worked on the film and has a copy of the original script corroborated the woman's account. There was no mention of Mohammed or Islam, the crew member said.
 
The filmmaker told the Wall Street Journal Jewish donors contributed $5 million to make the film. Based on the trailer, however, the amateurish movie appears to have been produced on a low budget.
 
Anti-Muslim activist Steve Klein, who said he was a script consultant for the movie, said the filmmaker told him his idea was to make a film that would reveal "facts, evidence and proof" about the Prophet Mohammed to people he perceived as radical Muslims.
Klein said the movie was called "Innocence of Bin Laden."
 
"Our intent was to reach out to the small minority of very dangerous people in California and try to shock them into understanding how dangerous Islam is," Klein said.
"We knew that it was going to cause some friction, if anybody paid attention to it," he said.
 
But when Klein went to the screening in the Los Angeles theater, no one was there.
"It was a bust, a wash," he said.
 
Killing shines light on Muslim sensitivities around Prophet Mohammed
But a while later, the trailers were online. They were segments focusing on the Prophet Mohammed and posted under the title, "Innocence of Mohammed."
The trailers were translated into Egyptian dialects of Arabic, the New York Times reported. Egyptian television aired certain segments.
And the fury erupted.
 
Klein told CNN Wednesday that the filmmaker, whom he called Sam Bacile, was in hiding.
 
"He's very depressed, and he's upset," Klein said. "I talked to him this morning, and he said that he was very concerned for what happened to the ambassador."
The Atlantic later quoted Klein as saying that Sam Bacile was a pseudonym. He said he did not know Bacile's real name.
 
Klein is known in Southern California for his vocal opposition to the construction of a mosque in Temecula, southeast of Los Angeles, in 2010. He heads up Concerned Citizens for the First Amendment, a group that contends Islam is a threat to American freedom.
 
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, says Klein, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran, helped train militant Christian fundamentalists prepare for war.
 
The movie got even more notice after it was promoted by anti-Islam activists, including Egyptian-born Coptic Christian Morris Sadek and Terry Jones, the Florida pastor whose Quran-burning last year sparked deadly riots in Afghanistan.
 
Jones said he had been contacted to help distribute the film.
 
"The film is not intended to insult the Muslim community, but it is intended to reveal truths about Mohammed that are possibly not widely known," Jones said in a statement.
 
"It is very clear that God did not influence him (Mohammed) in the writings of the Quran," said Jones, who went on to blame Muslims' fear of criticism for the protests, rather than the film.
 
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Jones to ask him to withdraw his support for the film, said Col. David Lapan, Dempsey's spokesman.
"Jones' support of the film risks causing more violence and death," Lapan said.
That fear mounted as anger raged in the Muslim world and especially as Friday, Islam's day of religious observance, fast approached.
 
CNN's Jennifer Wolfe, Miguel Marquez, Brian Todd, Chelsea Carter and Tom Watkins contributed to this report.

CNN
 
 
 
 
I think we over watered it!
 
 
U.S. officials: Attack on consulate in Libya may have been planned

By Karen DeYoung, Michael Birnbaum and William Branigin, Published: September 12The Washington Post

 
U.S. officials and Middle East analysts said Wednesday that an attack that killed four Americans at a U.S. Consulate in eastern Libya may have been planned by extremists and inspired by al-Qaeda.
 
The U.S. Ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans were killed Tuesday in an assault on the consulate in the city of Benghazi. President Obama strongly condemned the attack and pledged to bring the perpetrators to justice, vowing that “justice will be done.”
 
The attack followed a violent protest at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo over a low-budget anti-Muslim film made in the United States, and it initially appeared that the assault on the Benghazi consulate was another spontaneous response. But senior U.S. officials and Middle East analysts raised questions Wednesday about the motivation for the Benghazi attack, noting that it involved the use of a rocket-propelled grenade and followed an al-Qaeda call to avenge the death of a senior Libyan member of the terrorist network.
 
Libyan officials and a witness said the attackers took advantage of a protest over the film to launch their assault.
 
Stevens, 52, and the others appear to have been killed inside the temporary consulate, possibly by a rocket-propelled grenade, according to officials briefed on the assault.
 
On Wednesday, administration officials described a fast-moving assault on the Benghazi compound, which quickly overwhelmed Libyan guards and U.S. security forces, and separated the Americans from the ambassador they were supposed to protect. U.S. personnel lost touch with Stevens just minutes into the attack, about 10 p.m. Benghazi time. They didn’t see him again until his body was returned to U.S. custody, sometime around dawn.
 
“Frankly, we are not clear on the circumstances between the time he got separated from the group inside the burning building, to the time we were notified he was in Benghazi hospital,” a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity told reporters. “We were not able to see him until his body was returned to us at the airport.”
 
Stevens, based in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, happened to be visiting the U.S. outpost in Benghazi at the time of the attack. Officials said he was one of perhaps 25 or 30 people inside the U.S. consulate compound and its annex at 10 p.m. local time (4 p.m. Washington time), when unidentified gunmen began firing from outside.
 
Within 15 minutes, the officials said, the gunmen had entered the compound, and set its main building on fire. Three people were inside: Stevens, Sean Smith, a Foreign Service information management officer, and a Department of State security officer. As the building filled with dark smoke, the three became separated.
 
The security officer escaped, then went back inside with another officer. They found Smith dead inside, and pulled his body out. But they could not find Stevens, before being driven out of the building by smoke and gunfire.
 
Thirty minutes later, U.S. security officers tried again to enter the burning building. They withdrew, and eventually sheltered with all remaining personnel in an annex building. There, the personnel were under seige for two hours, taking fire that killed two more Americans and wounded three others.
 
The attack did not end until about 8:30 p.m. Washington time, when Libyan security forces helped drive away the attackers. Administration officials said they still were not sure Wednesday who the attackers were, or if the Benghazi attack was related to protests over an anti-Islamic movie at the U.S. embassy in Cairo the same day.
 
At some point during the attack, officials said, Stevens was taken out of the building where he was last seen. But they did not know how he got out, if Stevens was dead or alive when he left the compound, or whether he was taken to a hospital.
 
The Associated Press reported that Stevens arrived at a Benghazi hospital about 7 p.m. Eastern, and was pronounced dead later. Doctors said he died of asphyxiation, due to smoke inhalation. U.S. officials said that would have to be confirmed with an autopsy.
 
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said there is strong evidence that the attack was planned.
 
“This was a well-armed, well-coordinated event,” Rogers said in an interview on MSNBC. “It had both indirect and direct fire, and it had military maneuvers that were all part of this very organized attack.” Rogers referred to weapons that aimed directly at a target and those, such as rockets and mortars, that are fired without a direct line of sight.
 
According to Firas Abdelhakim, a Libyan television journalist who said he witnessed part of the attack, a group of several dozen armed men mounted the assault.
 
Abdelhakim said he was about three miles from consulate when he saw 20 to 30 cars driving toward the consulate shortly before 9:30 p.m. Tuesday.
 
When he reached the consulate, he said, he saw about 50 armed men gathering who were not carrying banners or chanting slogans. When asked who they were, they described themselves variously as “Muslims defending the Prophet” and “a group of Muslim youth” who were “defending Islam,” Abdelhakim said.
 
He said he saw Libyan security forces — the February 17 Battalion — guarding the consulate, a walled-off villa compound with several buildings, a swimming pool and one security watchtower on an unpaved side street in a prosperous residential district of Benghazi.
 
The assault on the consulate started sometime between 10:30 and 11 p.m., and the two groups traded fire, Abdelhakim said.
 
Benghazi residents said the compound had never previously had a major security presence around it.
 
Libyan Deputy Interior Minister Wanis al-Sharif said the security force was outgunned by the attackers, who joined a demonstration of “hundreds” of people outside the consulate. He said the original demonstration, which began as early as noon and escalated during the evening, was apparently called to protest the offensive film.
 
Sharif said armed men “infiltrated” the protest, but that the Libyan government did not believe they were Islamist militants. Instead, he said, authorities suspect they were loyalists of slain former strongman Moammar Gaddafi who were out to upend the country’s fragile political situation.
 
“We are going through a war with people from the old regime who are trying to destabilize security,” Sharif said. He also said the Libyan government believes that the first shot came from within the consulate compound, enraging the crowd. And he complained that the consulate should have extracted its employees earlier in the day and taken them to hotels or another secure location for safety.
 
Sharif said the consulate was completely burned and looted. “The most we expected was taking down the American flag and burning it,” he said. “We didn’t expect what happened to take place.”
 
The Defense Department has dispatched two Marine antiterrorism security teams to Libya to reinforce security there, a senior Marine official said. In a statement issued by the White House early Wednesday, Obama said he had directed an increase in security at U.S. diplomatic posts around the world.
 
(Find the latest updates on The Post’s live blog.)
 
The FBI said in a statement that it has opened an investigation into the deaths of the four Americans and the attack on the consulate. It said investigators would work closely with the State Department and “the appropriate government partners” in Libya.
 
“The FBI will not speculate on the facts and circumstances surrounding the attacks,” the statement said.
 
A U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said all four of the dead were State Department civilians. About a half dozen Americans were wounded in the attack, and it was not immediately clear if any of them were military. No U.S. Marines were posted at the consulate as part of its security detail, the official said.
 
The attack was the latest in a series of violent assaults in Benghazi over the last several months — many, but not all, directed against U.S. interests there.
 
Tuesday’s assault was the second on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. On June 5, a bomb exploded outside the gates of the compound in the first targeting of an American facility since the fall of Gaddafi last year.
 
The following day in Benghazi, two British bodyguards were injured in an attack on a convoy carrying the British ambassador to Libya. Last month, unknown assailants attacked a compound of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Libyan port city of Misurata. No one was injured in that attack.
 
A group allied with al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility for several recent assaults in Benghazi. But there was no immediate claim of responsibility for Tuesday’s attack.
 
Obama said Wednesday morning that the United States “condemns in the strongest possible terms this outrageous and shocking attack” and is working with the Libyan government to secure U.S. diplomats and bring the attackers to justice.
 
Appearing with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in the White House Rose Garden, Obama said: “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, but there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts.”
 
He said many Libyans have already joined that stand, and he vowed, “This attack will not break the bonds between the United States and Libya.” He stressed that Libyan security personnel had “fought back against the attackers alongside Americans” and that other Libyans carried Stevens’s body to the hospital and helped U.S. diplomats find safety.
 
Obama added: “We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.”
 
Obama spoke as some Middle East analysts suggested that the attack in Benghazi might have been launched as revenge for the death of a top al-Qaeda militant who was killed by an American drone strike in Pakistan in June.
 
Mathieu Guidere, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Toulouse in France and an expert on Islamist radicals, said information from militant Web sites suggested that Libyan extremists seized on the film to rally people around an attack on the consulate. He said the attack appeared to be motivated by a recent call by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda leader, to avenge the killing of Hassan Mohammed Qaed, better known as Abu Yahya al-Libi, a Libyan-born cleric who was a key aide to Osama bin Laden.
 
Quillam, a respected British think-tank that monitors extremist groups, said its sources in Libya and elsewhere in the region described the attack as a well-planned assault that occurred in two waves and was organized by a group of about 20 militants. The first wave involved driving the Americans from the consulate, and the second was a coordinated attack using a rocket-propelled grenade after they were taken to another location.
 
“These are acts committed by uncontrollable jihadist groups,” said Noman Benotam, the president of Quillam.
 
Zawahiri, an Egyptian who took over as al-Qaeda leader after bin Laden was killed in a U.S. raid on his Pakistani hideout in May, issued a 42-minute video Monday acknowledging Libi’s death and calling on Muslims, particularly fellow Libyans, to seek vengeance for the killing.
 
“With the martyrdom of Sheikh Hassan Mohammed Qaed, may God have mercy on him, people will flock even more to his writings and his call, God willing,” Zawahiri said in the video. “His blood urges you and incites you to fight and kill the crusaders.”
 
Stevens, a longtime Middle East hand in the State Department, was named ambassador to Libya in May. He had worked in Libya for a number of years, both before and after the fall of Gaddafi.
 
In an interview with The Washington Post in June, Stevens said Libya’s emerging democracy faces a threat from small, violent Islamist groups that reject elections.
 
“These are, for the most part, new groups that are emerging after the revolution, and the Libyans themselves don’t know who they are,” Stevens said. “Some of these groups are probably forming out of the militias that grew out of the revolution, and they have access to arms, so that is troubling.”
 
On the recent series of violent incidents in Libya, Stevens said, “When people cross the line, it’s also a function of a lack of strong state and police to enforce the law.”
 
Obama called Stevens a “courageous and exemplary representative” of the U.S. government, who “selflessly served our country and the Libyan people.”
 
“His legacy will endure wherever human beings reach for liberty and justice,” Obama said.
 
Clinton said she had called Libyan President Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf “to coordinate additional support to protect Americans in Libya.”
 
The attack in Benghazi followed protests in neighboring Egypt, where a group of protesters scaled the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday evening and entered its outer grounds, pulled down an American flag, then tried to burn it outside the embassy walls, according to witnesses. On Wednesday morning, a sit-in by several dozen protesters continued outside the Cairo embassy.
 
The attack on the embassy in Cairo was apparently prompted by outrage over an independent, anti-Muslim film made in the United States. It illustrated a deep vein of anti-American sentiment, even though the United States supported Arab Spring revolutions and was instrumental in providing financial and diplomatic support for their newly-democratic governments.
 
After his Rose Garden remarks, Obama headed to the State Department with Clinton to address a closed session of the diplomatic workforce. A White House official said Obama held the meeting “to express his solidarity with our diplomats stationed around the world.” The official said Obama wanted to “give thanks for the service and sacrifices that our civilians make, and pay tribute to those who were lost.”
 
Clinton identified Smith as a Foreign Service information management officer for 10 years who was on a temporary assignment in Libya. She said Smith, an Air Force veteran, left a wife and two children. The names of the other two people killed were being withheld pending notification of their families, Clinton said.
 
Before appearing at the White House with Obama, Clinton called those who attacked the Benghazi consulate a “small and savage group,” praised the response by the Libyan government and people to the violence and said the assault would not deter the United States from helping Libya become free and stable.
 
“This is an attack that should shock the conscience of people of all faiths around the world,” Clinton said in a solemn speech at the State Department. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this senseless act of violence.”
 
“Today many Americans are asking — indeed I asked myself — how could this happen,” she said. “How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how complicated and, at times, how confounding, the world can be. But we must be clear-eyed even in our grief. This was an attack by a small and savage group, not by the people or government of Libya.”
 
Clinton said Libyans had helped to repel the attackers and lead other Americans to safety, and she said Libya’s president has pledged to pursue those responsible.
 
Stressing that “a free and stable Libya” is in the U.S. interest, Clinton said, “We will not turn our back on that. Nor will we rest until those responsible for these attacks are found and brought to justice.”
 
She said some people have sought to justify the violence as “a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.” She added: “There is no justification for this.... Violence like this is no way to honor religion or faith, and as long as there are those who would take innocent life in the name of God, the world will never know a true and lasting peace.”
 
Both the Egyptian and Libyan governments condemned the violence outside the American diplomatic compounds. But local security officials in both countries appeared slow to provide protection for the American diplomatic installations and have issued no firm statements explaining the violence.
 
In a news conference in Tripoli Wednesday, Libya’s prime minister and parliamentary speaker apologized for the assault and extended sympathy for the deaths to the United States and families of the victims.
 
While they provided no details, they offered two alternative theories regarding the perpetrators, saying at one point that Gaddafi loyalists were responsible but later saying that it involved “extremists” and was related to Tuesday’s anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.
 
The film that appeared to have sparked the protest in Cairo is called “The Innocence of Muslims.” It calls the prophet Muhammad a fraud and shows him having sex. A controversial Cairo television host, Sheikh Khaled Abdallah, aired clips from the video on an Islamic-focused television station on Saturday, and the same video clips were posted online on Monday.
 
A man who identified himself as Sam Bacile said he made the film. Bacile had gone into hiding on Tuesday, but remained defiant in his condemnations of Islam, the Associated Press reported.
 
Bacile described himself to several news organizations as an Israeli-born Jew who works as a real estate developer in California. The Washington Post included that identification, citing the AP interview. But Steve Klein, an associate of Bacile, told the Atlantic that Bacile was in fact a pseudonym. Bacile is not listed in any directories or incorporations or real estate deeds and is not licensed in California as a real estate broker.
 
The crisis quickly spilled over into the U.S. presidential campaign, as Mitt Romney issued a brief statement saying he was “outraged” by the assaults. Romney then said, “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn the attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
 
Obama’s reelection campaign quickly responded in kind, saying, “We are shocked that, at a time when the United States of America is confronting the tragic death of one of our diplomatic officers in Libya, Governor Romney would choose the launch of a political attack.”
 
Romney, speaking to reporters on the campaign trail Wednesday, stood by his criticism.
 
Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador to be killed in the line of duty since 1988, when Arnold Raphel was killed in a mysterious airplane crash in Pakistan along with Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq.
 
Birnbaum reported from Cairo. Sari Horwitz, Douglas Frantz , Tara Bahrampour, Craig M. Whitlock and David A. Fahrenthold in Washington, Edward Cody in Paris, HaithamTabei in Cairo, and Ingy Hassieb in El-Arish, Egypt, contributed to this report.
 
The Washington Post

 

 


 
 
 
 
 
Jacked on coffee and the Koran.





Protests enter 4th day as anger toward U.S. spreads through Muslim world

By Michael Birnbaum and Debbi Wilgoren, Updated: Friday, September 14, 10:02 AMThe Washington Post

CAIRO – A new wave of anti-American protests erupted across the Muslim world Friday, as Egypt’s recently elected government and its counterparts elsewhere struggled to contain anger sparked by a movie that mocks the prophet Muhammad.
Protesters in Tunis broke into the U.S. Embassy compound and set fire to cars in the parking lot before being pushed out by police and special forces, who also confronted stone-throwing crowds with tear gas and gunfire, the Associated Press reported. Police in Khartoum, Sudan fired on protesters trying to scale the walls of the embassy there, AP said. And security forces in Sanaa, Yemen, fired guns in the air to keep protesters away from that city’s U.S. Embassy, a day after its compound was broken into and looted.
American outposts in the Middle East are watching for new demonstrations over a movie that ridicules the prophet Muhammad. Protests have occurred in at least 10 nations since the first disturbances on Tuesday at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt.

 
 
In Tripoli, Lebanon, demonstrators set fire to a KFC restaurant and a Hardee’s, according to AP. Security forces opened fire, killing at least one person. Twenty-five people were injured in clashes, most of them police.
 
 
Anti-U.S. demonstrations were also underway in Afghanistan, Bahrain, East Jerusalem, Great Britain, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Qatar, Syria, Turkey and the West Bank, AP reported, with many protesters chanting religious slogans and railing against the denigration of Islam in the obscure, apparently made-in-America film.
 
 
In Egypt — a key player in the Arab world and longtime U.S. partner, where the overthrow of strongman Hosni Mubarak in 2011 led to the democratic election of President Mohamed Morsi— the challenge of maintaining a good relationship with Washington while still addressing public outrage over the incendiary video was clearly on display.
 
 
Thousands gathered in Tahrir Square, 350 yards from the fortress-like U.S. Embassy breached earlier this week. Security forces constructed a massive concrete wall to block off one access road to the embassy, witnesses said, and skirmished with demonstrators who arrived in a slow stream after midday prayers.
 
 
The government appealed for calm, with Morsi — who had received a stern telephone call from President Obama Wednesday night — appearing on state television to call for restraint. State television also repeatedly played a Thursday message from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in which she called the obscure, made-in-America video “disgusting and reprehensible.”
 
 
The powerful Muslim Brotherhood organization, with which Morsi is affiliated, sent out an English-language tweet at 11:53 a.m. local time (5:53 a.m. in Washington) saying that it “cancels Friday’s nationwide protests, announces it will be present only in #Tahrir, for symbolic protest against the movie.”
 
 
But Mahmoud Hussein, the organization’s secretary general, dispatched an Arabic-language statement less than an hour later, at 12:12 p.m., calling for protests “in front of the mosques of the whole country . . . to show the whole Egyptian people’s anger.”
 
 
Reflecting worry from influential Egyptian political and clerical leaders that the tone of demonstrations had gotten too heated, the ultraconservative Nour political party said Thursday that Friday’s demonstrations should take place away from embassies and condemned both violence and the video.
 

“We appreciate and value . . . the statement from the American embassy that condemned the insult to Islam and its prophets,” the party said in a statement.
 
 
In the end, the relatively low turnout in Cairo, where few protesters in Tahrir Square identified themselves with the Muslim Brotherhood, may have reflected a successful call for restraint from the country’s leaders, although the crowd continued to fluctuate as night fell on the city.

American outposts in the Middle East are watching for new demonstrations over a movie that ridicules the prophet Muhammad. Protests have occurred in at least 10 nations since the first disturbances on Tuesday at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt.

But many who turned out illustrated the challenges that Morsi faces.
 
 
“Morsi’s stance was halfway there,” said Roshy Kamel, 34, who had a thick beard typical of conservative Muslims. “We need him to suspend Egyptian-American relations and expel the American ambassador. We need him to show we are strong.”
 
 
It was impossible to know how many of thousands of demonstrators who filled streets outside U.S. outposts were actually motivated by reports about the movie — which was made under mysterious circumstances, apparently by individuals in California — and how many were venting anger at the United States for other reasons. A short clip of the film has been circulated on the Internet for weeks, but apparently did not generate much attention until it was subtitled in Arabic and sent to Egyptian journalists.
 
 
But the vehemence and volatile nature of the protests in capital after capital — images of which were broadcast around the globe almost instantly via blogs, social media networks and cable news stations — was unmistakable.
 

In Khartoum, about 5,000 demonstrators gathered at the German and British embassies around midday Friday and stormed Germany’s, setting it ablaze. Buses full of protesters then headed for the U.S. Embassy, on the outskirts of the city, al-Jazeera said. Witnesses told the Associated Press that thousands of Sudanese soon gathered outside the American diplomatic facility and were trying to climb its walls when police opened fire. At least three protesters were seen motionless on the ground, injured or perhaps dead, the news service said.

In Sanaa, security outside the embassy had been significantly increased after protesters broke into the compound Thursday, smashing windows and looting offices. A new roadblock was set up to keep protesters farther away from the embassy, and two Yemeni security officers said they had been given orders to use live ammunition if the protests got too close to the compound. Several prominent conservative Muslim leaders in Yemen condemned Thursday’s embassy break-in.
 
 
Still, demonstrators on Friday burned U.S. flags and chanted “Death to America, death to Israel,” as they had the previous day. Security forces fired into the air, used tear gas and fired water cannons. The protests did not appear to have grown in size since Thursday.
 
 
In a measure of the tension between American diplomats in Cairo and the Egyptian government, a minor tempest broke out Thursday on Twitter between representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and U.S. Embassy public affairs officials.
 
 
The Brotherhood posted a message of support for the embassy staff, saying it was “relieved” that no diplomatic worker had been harmed in the Cairo demonstrations and expressing hope that relations between the countries would be maintained through the “turbulence of Tuesday’s events.”

In response, the U.S. Embassy feed said, “Thanks. By the way, have you checked out your own Arabic feeds? I hope you know we read those too,” an apparent reference to the calls for more protests.
 
 
“We understand you’re under a lot of stress,” the Brotherhood replied. “But it will be more helpful if you point out exactly the Arabic feed of concern.”

American outposts in the Middle East are watching for new demonstrations over a movie that ridicules the prophet Muhammad. Protests have occurred in at least 10 nations since the first disturbances on Tuesday at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt.

The start of the protests, on Tuesday, coincided with an attack by militants on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. diplomatic personnel.
 
 
Although analysts believe the attack was premeditated, and not directly linked to anger over the anti-Muslim video, the bloodshed added to the urgency in recent days as the Obama administration tried to restore calm.
 
 
“The U.S. government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” Clinton said at a meeting in Washington on Thursday with a delegation from Morocco. “We absolutely reject its content and messages. But there is no justification — none at all — for responding to this video with violence.”
 
 
The message went out from Washington throughout the day, in White House briefings, in speeches in Arab capitals and through official Web sites, e-mails and Twitter feeds from the State Department and its embassies around the globe.
 
 
In Pakistan, where anti-American demonstrations are frequent, the government said it had “banned” the American-made video and blocked access to it online. Although Afghanistan reportedly did the same, “Innocence of Muslims” was easily available there on the Internet on Thursday night.
 
 
Google, which owns YouTube, said it had acted on its own to stop access to the video in Egypt and Libya. A Google official said the company was “watching carefully” events in other countries.
 
 
National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said the White House did not ask Google or YouTube to remove the video. “We reached out to YouTube to call the video to their attention and asked them to review whether it violates their terms of use,” he said.
 
 
The administration has criticized other governments for trying to shut down the Internet, bar certain content or jam cellphone and other communications it finds displeasing. It also has assisted dissidents in countries such as Syria in making their voices heard electronically. And it has struggled to develop its own ability to promote U.S. messages through social media. In separate programs, the State Department and the Pentagon have spent tens of millions of dollars to monitor the public communications of others and send out their own.
 
 
Wilgoren reported from Washington. Karen DeYoung, Greg Miller and David Nakamura in Washington, Richard Leiby in Kabul and Mohammad al-Qadhi in Sanaa contributed to this report.

The Washington Post
 
 
 
 
 
Middle Eastern "Roulette".
 
 
 
Libya Attack Brings Challenges for U.S.
 
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: September 12, 2012 2155 Comments
 
CAIRO — Islamist militants armed with antiaircraft weapons and rocket-propelled grenades stormed a lightly defended United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, late Tuesday, killing the American ambassador and three members of his staff and raising questions about the radicalization of countries swept up in the Arab Spring.
 
The ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, was missing almost immediately after the start of an intense, four-hour firefight for control of the mission, and his body was not located until Wednesday morning at dawn, when he was found dead at a Benghazi hospital, American and Libyan officials said. It was the first time since 1979 that an American ambassador had died in a violent assault.
 
American and European officials said that while many details about the attack remained unclear, the assailants seemed organized, well trained and heavily armed, and they appeared to have at least some level of advance planning. But the officials cautioned that it was too soon to tell whether the attack was related to the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Fighters involved in the assault, which was spearheaded by a Islamist brigade formed during last year’s uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, said in interviews during the battle that they were moved to attack the mission by anger over a 14-minute, American-made video that depicted the Prophet Muhammad, Islam’s founder, as a villainous, homosexual and child-molesting buffoon. Their attack followed by just a few hours the storming of the compound surrounding the United States Embassy in Cairo by an unarmed mob protesting the same video. On Wednesday, new crowds of protesters gathered outside the United States Embassies in Tunis and Cairo.
 
The wave of unrest set off by the video, posted online in the United States two months ago and dubbed into Arabic for the first time eight days ago, has further underscored the instability of the countries that cast off their longtime dictators in the Arab Spring revolts. It also cast doubt on the adequacy of security preparations at American diplomatic outposts in the volatile region.
 
Benghazi, awash in guns, has recently witnessed a string of assassinations as well as attacks on international missions, including a bomb said to be planted by another Islamist group that exploded near the United States mission there as recently as June. But a Libyan politician who had breakfast with Mr. Stevens at the mission the morning before he was killed described security, mainly four video cameras and as few as four Libyan guards, as sorely inadequate for an American ambassador in such a tumultuous environment. “This country is still in transition, and everybody knows the extremists are out there,” said Fathi Baja, the Libyan politician.
 
Obama Vows Justice
 
President Obama condemned the killings, promised to bring the assailants to justice and ordered tighter security at all American diplomatic installations. The administration also sent 50 Marines to the Libyan capital, Tripoli, to help with security at the American Embassy there, ordered all nonemergency personnel to leave Libya and warned Americans not to travel there. A senior defense official said that the Pentagon sent two warships toward the Libyan coast as a precaution.
“These four Americans stood up for freedom and human dignity,” Mr. Obama said in a televised statement from the White House Rose Garden with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.”
In Tripoli, Libyan leaders also vowed to track down the attackers and stressed their unity with Washington.
 
Yussef Magariaf, president of the newly elected Libyan National Congress, offered “an apology to the United States and the Arab people, if not the whole world, for what happened.” He pledged new measures to ensure the security of foreign diplomats and companies. “We together with the United States government are on the same side, standing in a united front in the face of these murderous outlaws.”
 
Obama administration officials and regional officials scrambled to sort out conflicting reports about the attack and the motivation of the attackers. A senior Obama administration officials told reporters during a conference call that “it was clearly a complex attack,” but offered no details.
 
Col. Wolfgang Pusztai, who until early August was Austria’s defense attaché to Libya and visited the country every month, said in an e-mail that he believed the attack was “deliberately planned and executed” by about a core group of 30 to 40 assailants who were “well trained and organized.” But he said the reports from some terrorism experts that the attack may be linked to the recent death in drone strikes of senior Qaeda leaders, including Abu Yahya al-Libi, were unsupported.
 
A translated version of the video that set off the uprising arrived first in Egypt before reaching the rest of the Islamic world. Its author, whose identity is now a mystery, devoted the video’s prologue to caricatured depictions of Egyptian Muslims abusing Egyptian Coptic Christians while Egyptian police officers stood by. It was publicized last week by an American Coptic Christian activist, Morris Sadek, well known here for his scathing attacks on Islam.
Mr. Sadek promoted the video in tandem with a declaration by Terry Jones — a Florida pastor best known for burning the Koran and promoting what he called “International Judge Muhammad Day” on Sept. 11.
 
The video began attracting attention in the Egyptian news media, including the broadcast of offensive scenes on Egyptian television last week. At that point, American diplomats in Cairo informed the State Department of the festering outrage in the days before the Sept. 11 anniversary, said a person briefed on their concerns. But officials in Washington declined to address or disavow the video, this person said.
 
By late afternoon Tuesday, hundreds had gathered in mostly peaceful protest outside the United States Embassy here, overseen by a large contingent of Egyptian security forces. But around 6 p.m., after the end of the workday and television news coverage of the event, the crowd began to swell, including a group of rowdy young soccer fans.
 
Gaining Entrance
 
Then, around 6:30 p.m., a small group of protesters — one official briefed on the events put it around 20 — brought a ladder to the wall of the compound and quickly scaled it, gaining entrance to the ground. Embassy officials asked the Egyptian government to remove the infiltrators without using weapons or force, to avoid inflaming the situation, this official said. (An embassy official said that contrary to reports on Tuesday, no one fired weapons in the air.) But it took the Egyptian security officers five hours to remove the intruders, leaving them ample time to run around the grounds, deface American flags, and hoist the black flag favored by Islamic ultraconservatives and labeled with Islam’s most basic expression of faith, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
 
It is unclear if television images of Islamist protesters may have inspired the attack in Benghazi, which had been a hotbed of opposition to Colonel Qaddafi and remains unruly since the Libyan uprising resulted in his death. But Tuesday night, a group of armed assailants mixed with unarmed demonstrators gathered at the small compound that housed a temporary American diplomatic mission there.
 
The ambassador, Mr. Stevens, was visiting the city Tuesday from the United States Embassy compound in Tripoli to attend the planned opening of an American cultural center, and was staying at the mission. It is not clear if the assailants knew that the ambassador was at the mission.
 
Interviewed at the scene on Tuesday night, many attackers and those who backed them said they were determined to defend their faith from the video’s insults. Some recalled an earlier episode when protesters in Benghazi had burned down the Italian consulate after an Italian minister had worn a T-shirt emblazoned with cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Ten people were reportedly killed in clashes with Colonel Qaddafi’s police force.
 
That assault was led by a brigade of Islamist fighters known as Ansar al-Sharia, or the Supporters of Islamic Law. Brigade members emphasized at the time that they were not acting alone. On Wednesday, perhaps apprehensive over Mr. Stevens’s death, the brigade said in a statement that its supporters “were not officially involved or were not ordered to be involved” in the attack.
 
At the same time, the brigade praised those who protested as “the best of the best” of the Libyan people and supported their response to the video “in the strongest possible terms.”
 
Conflicting Accounts
 
There were conflicting accounts of how Mr. Stevens had died. One witness to the mayhem around the compound on Tuesday said militants chased him to a safe house and lobbed grenades at the location, where he was later found unconscious, apparently from smoke inhalation, and could not be revived by rescuers who took him to a hospital.
 
An unidentified Libyan official in Benghazi told Reuters that Mr. Stevens and three staff members were killed in Benghazi “when gunmen fired rockets at them.” The Libyan official said the ambassador was being driven from the mission building to a safer location when gunmen opened fire, Reuters said.
 
Five American ambassadors had been killed by terrorists before Tuesday’s attack, according to the State Department. The most recent was Adolph Dubs, killed after being kidnapped in Afghanistan in 1979. The others were John Gordon Mein, in Guatemala in 1968; Cleo A. Noel Jr., in Sudan in 1973; Rodger P. Davies, in Cyprus in 1974; and Francis E. Meloy Jr., in Lebanon in 1976.
 
Witnesses and State Department officials said that the attack began almost immediately after the protesters and the brigade arrived around 10 p.m. Witnesses said the brigade started the attack by firing a rocket-propelled grenade at the gate of the mission’s main building. American officials said that by 10:15 the attackers had gained entrance to the main building.
A second wave of assailants arrived soon after and swarmed into the compound, witnesses said.
 
“They expected that there would be more American commandos in there. They went in with guns blazing, with R.P.G.’s,” said Mohamed Ali, a relative of the landlord who rents the building to the American mission and who watched the battle.
 
Libya’s deputy interior minister, Wanis al-Sharif, made somewhat contradictory and defensive-sounding statements about the attack.
 
He acknowledged that he had ordered the withdrawal of security forces from the scene in the early stages of the protest on Wednesday night. He said his initial instinct was to avoid inflaming the situation by risking a confrontation with people angry about the video.
He also said he had underestimated the aggression of the protesters. But he criticized the small number of guards inside the mission for shooting back in self-defense, saying their response probably further provoked the attackers.
 
The small number of Libyans guarding the facility, estimated at only six, did not hold out long against the attackers, who had substantial firepower, the interior minister and State Department officials said. Defending the facility would have been a “suicide mission,” Mr. Sharif said.
 
Mr. Sharif also faulted the Americans at the mission for failing to heed what he said was the Libyan government’s advice to pull its personnel or beef up its security, especially in light of the recent violence in the city and the likelihood that the video would provoke protests. “What is weird is that they refrained from this procedure, depending instead on the simple protection that they had,” he said. “What happened later is beyond our control, and they are responsible for part of what happened.”
 
When the attack began, only Mr. Stevens, an aide named Sean Smith and a State Department security officer were inside the main building. As the building filled with smoke, security officers recovered Mr. Smith’s body but were driven out again by the firefight, senior administration officials said. Mr. Stevens, however, could not be found and was lost for the rest of the night.
It took another hour — until 11:20 — before American and Libyan forces recaptured the main building and evacuated the entire staff to an annex nearly a mile away. The militants followed and the fighting continued there until 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, when Libyan security reinforcements arrived and managed to gain control of both compounds.
 
A freelance photographer took pictures of Libyans apparently carrying Mr. Stevens’s ash-covered body out of the scene that were distributed worldwide by Agence France-Presse. A doctor who treated him at the Benghazi hospital told The Associated Press that Libyans had brought him in but were unaware of his identity. The doctor said that he tried for 90 minutes to revive Mr. Stevens but that he died of asphyxiation, The A.P. reported.
A senior administration official said it was not clear how or when Mr. Stevens was taken to the hospital — or by whom. “We frankly don’t know how he got from where Americans last saw him,” the official said.
 
On Wednesday night, residents of both Tripoli and Benghazi staged demonstrations to condemn the attack and express their sorrow at the loss of Mr. Stevens. Stationed in Benghazi during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi, Mr. Stevens, who was fluent in Arabic and French, had become a local hero for his support to the Libyan rebels during their time of greatest need. Benghazi residents circulated photographs online of Mr. Stevens frequenting local restaurants, relishing local dishes, and strolling city streets, apparently without a security detail.
 
On Wednesday, some friends of Mr. Stevens suggested that his faith in his bond with the people of Benghazi may have blinded him to the dangers there. “Everybody liked him,” said Mr. Baja, who ate breakfast with Mr. Stevens on Tuesday. “He is a good man, a friendly man, he knows lots of the sheiks in town and a lot of the intellectuals have spent some good times with him.”
 
“The people in Benghazi, I think, are very sad right now.”
 
David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Steven Lee Myers from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Osama Alfitory and Suliman Ali Zway from Benghazi, Libya; Mai Ayyad from Cairo; Eric Schmitt and Scott Shane from Washington; and Alan Cowell from London.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
 
Correction: September 12, 2012
 
An earlier version of this article misstated Mohammed Magarief’s position. He is the president of Libya’s National Assembly, not Libya’s interim president.
 
A version of this article appeared in print on September 13, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Attack On U.S. Site in Libya Kills Envoy; A Flash Point for Obama and Romney.
 The New York Times
 
 
 
So how do I write a closing for this article?  I suppose I'd just like to tell our Middle Eastern friends, "don't go away mad - just go".  I'm Felicity and thanks for being with the Noodleman Group.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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