Most Eyebrow-Raising Headline of the Week

"Turkish Men Getting Mustache Implants"

If Eyes Are Windows To the Soul, Then All Of These Women Are Crazy

Paula Broadwell, Army Reserve officer and fitness freak

Something about the 'crazy eyes' and runner's physique of Paula Broadwell reminded me of someone else. It finally dawned on me who she resembles - Air Force Major Jill Metzger.

Jill Metzger, Air Force Major and marathon runner

Metzger was assigned to Manas Air Force Base in Kyrgyzstan when she mysteriously disappeared for three days just before she was due to rotate back to the USA. Then, she showed up telling a crazy story about being abducted and escaping.

There was an investigation, of course, but the Air Force seemed to not really want to find out what happened, or at least didn't want to say what happened. With the investigation unresolved, Metzger went away quietly, temporarily retired for a few years on medical grounds of post-traumatic stress disorder,  before being returned to active duty. 

Lisa Nowak, Navy Captain and astronaut

Both of them look like Lisa Nowak, the former naval aviator and NASA astronaut who assaulted and attempted to kidnap her romantic rival, an Air Force Captain named Colleen Shipman who was involved with Nowak's astronaut-boy friend, William Oefelein.

Nowak drove overnight from Houston to Orlando to confront Shipman in an airport parking lot, bringing with her some latex gloves, a black wig, an air pistol, pepper spray, a hooded trench coat, a 2-pound drilling hammer, black gloves, rubber tubing, plastic garbage bags, and a folding knife.

Her lawyer later stated that she was suffering from major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, insomnia, and brief psychotic disorder with marked stressors at the time. Ms. Shipman put it more simply to the judge at Nowak's sentencing: "It was in her eyes: limitless, blood-chilling expression of limitless rage."

Jennifer Wilbanks, civilian, runaway bride

Compare all of them to Jennifer Wilbanks, the Georgia woman who went out jogging four days before her gargantuan 600-guest wedding and then didn't return home. That brought on a nationwide police search and a full-blown media feeding frenzy until Wilbanks turned up outside a 7-11 in Albuquerque telling a tall tale about abduction and sexual assault.

While police dithered about whether to charge her with making a false report, Wilbanks checked into a medical treatment program to address physical and mental problems.

Wilbanks and her ex-fiancé sold the media rights to their story for half a million dollars. Then Wilbanks sued the ex-fiancé, claiming that she granted him power of attorney to negotiate the sale while she was hospitalized and under medication, and demanded that he give her his share of the $500,000 plus another $250,000 in punitive damages. 

As a public service to my male readers: I implore you, when you see a woman with eyes like that, don't just walk away, run.
    

Benghazi Goes Back On The Front Burner

Now that that little interregnum is over, it's back to Benghazi. There are four separate House and Senate hearings scheduled for this week, the last I saw. Maybe more.

State Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy and Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell will provide classified briefings this week to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and the Republican chairmen and top Democrats of House committees.

A/S Boswell was missed at last month's House Oversight Committee hearing, so it's good he'll be able to make the hearings this week.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee asked Hillary to testify at an open hearing this Thursday. That would make for one extremely watchable hearing. But Hillary sent her regrets, as she will be traveling next week. I would not be surprised if Hillary spends even more time than usual on urgent overseas travel from now until the day she steps down.

Will General Petraeus testify at any of those hearings, even though he has stepped down as CIA Director? A couple Senators have said it is essential that he do so, and Representative King, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has said Petraeus will have to have to testify "one way or the other.” As in, either voluntarily or under subpoena.

I don't know if he'll testify or not, but I do know that there is nothing like a still-developing sex scandal to amp up press coverage and public interest. While I'm on that subject, isn't it remarkable that "Paula Broadwell" sounds like a double entendre name for a Bond girl? Could that be more perfect?

And so, Official Washington is off to the next round of congressional hearings on the Benghazi incident. That should hold us over until the Benghazi Accountability Review Board finishes its report, maybe next month. The Holiday Season looks like it will be jam-packed with political delights.  

Most Eyebrow-Raising Headline of the Week - Special Eid Edition

"Sacrificial Ram Butts Owner to Death" - Emirites 24/7

So True

Technical countermeasures have their place, but, as The Covert Comic's Executive Intelligence Summary reminds us, "the true SCIF is your soul."

Friday Document Dump Dumps On Some Unintended Libyan Victims

beep ... beep ... beep

It's usually the White House that does Friday late afternoon document dumps. But this time it was the House Oversight Committee, and it released leaked State Department cables and documents concerning the security environment in Libya. And, while the motive for a Friday document dump is usually to minimize press attention to embarrassing information, I assume the Committee wanted those documents to get all the press attention they possibly can before Monday's Presidential debate.

That's fair. This is politics (and I don't mean that in a derogatory way; all elected officials make all their decisions for political reasons, which is how representational democracy is supposed to work).

However, this document dump splattered on some innocent victims in Libya. From Foreign Policy's The Cable:

[House Oversight Committee Chairman] Issa posted 166 pages of sensitive but unclassified State Department communications related to Libya on the committee's website afternoon as part of his effort to investigate security failures and expose contradictions in the administration's statements regarding the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi that resulted in the death of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

-- snip --

But Issa didn't bother to redact the names of Libyan civilians and local leaders mentioned in the cables, and just as with the WikiLeaks dump of State Department cables last year, the administration says that Issa has done damage to U.S. efforts to work with those Libyans and exposed them to physical danger from the very groups that had an interest in attacking the U.S. consulate.

"Much like WikiLeaks, when you dump a bunch of documents into the ether, there are a lot of unintended consequences," an administration official told The Cable Friday afternoon. "This does damage to the individuals because they are named, danger to security cooperation because these are militias and groups that we work with and that is now well known, and danger to the investigation, because these people could help us down the road."

-- snip --

"It betrays the trust of people we are trying to maintain contact with on a regular basis, including security officials inside militias and civil society people as well," another administration official told The Cable. "It's a serious betrayal of trust for us and it hurts our ability to maintain these contacts going forward. It has the potential to physically endanger these people. They didn't sign up for that. Neither did we."

-- snip --

The Cable pointed out that even WikiLeaks had approached the State Department and offered to negotiate retractions of sensitive information before releasing their cables. Hill confirmed that Issa did not grant the State Department that opportunity but said it was the State Department's fault for not releasing the documents when they were first requested.

Whoever took it upon himself to leak those documents to the Committee in the first place was in the wrong, but that's another matter. Presumably, whoever it was didn't believe that the Administration would be fully responsive to the Oversight Committee's request for documents about the State Department's deliberations over the correct level of security in Benghazi. Who would believe that, given the election year timing and the Administration's stonewalling on the Fast and Furious investigation? So, the leaker is either a whistle-blower or a traitor, depending upon your partisan leaning. 

I don't fault the Committee for releasing the documents when they did. Like I said, that's politics representational democracy. The voters are the ultimate decision-makers, and they need a reasonably free flow of information. It was a fair hit. Releasing damaging information is the most bipartisan activity in Washington.

But the Committee was reckless and irresponsible. They backed the dumpster up and tilted all that Sensitive But Unclassified info all over the street without first asking the Department to redact anything damaging. (I mean, damaging to anyone other than the intended political target.) There was no good reason not to give the Department a day to do some redacting. Apparently, the Committee leadership just didn't think about that before they acted.

I guess that why it's called the oversight committee.  

I Love the Smell Of Dip Notes In the Morning

Edward R. Murrow famously said of diplomacy:

“The real crucial link in the international exchange is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.”

Maybe Ed didn't know this, but the Claymore anti-personnel mine can do a lot better than three feet. It can extend the maximum range of interpersonal exchange all the way out to 270 yards, although its effectiveness is optimized at 55 yards, where it has a 30 percent chance of making personal contact with anyone standing in a 60-degree horizontal arc to its front.

After the September 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, I had a conversation with a casual acquaintance who asked me, in all seriousness, why U.S. embassies can't be defended with Claymore mines and concertinas of razor ribbon. Well, he was half right, since we do have razor ribbon in quite a few places. But, anti-personnel land mines? Really?

You might think - I used to think - that the practical, legal, and political consequences of that would be obvious. But, apparently they are not. In fact, I get the definite impression that many people conceive of a diplomatic mission such as the one in Benghazi as a military outpost in a war zone.

Since the September 11 attack in Benghazi, I have come to realize that nearly all of the voting, tax-paying, American public gets its information about embassies and diplomacy from ... oh, I don't know, really bad action movies, maybe.

Public diplomacy ought to start at home. Have there been any realistic depictions of diplomatic missions in American popular media? I can't recall any.