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Mullings
An American Cyber-Column
Enemies Foreign and Domestic
Rich Galen
Monday, May 6, 2013

Every Member of Congress and commissioned officer (civilian and military) in federal service
as well as every enlisted service member takes an oath that requires they promise to
“support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and
domestic …”

This oath is required by statute. The Presidential oath, the only oath in the Constitution, does
not contain that language:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the
United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the
Constitution of the United States.”

I only raise that because the issue of “enemies foreign or domestic” has raised its ugly head in
Boston in Damascus and in Benghazi.

First Boston.

I don’t know very much about the ins and outs of visa vigilance as they pertain to one Tamerlan
Tsarnaev (the dead Boston bomber). That’s not much of a problem.

What is a problem is when the FBI, DHS, NSA, NSC, CIA, and, for all I know, MIB don’t
seem to be able to track a guy about whom they have been warned. And some or all of those
agencies were warned by our loyal allies in the security area, the Russians.

At one point we were told that Tsarnaev slipped through the immigration net having taking a
six month trip to Russia because his name had been misspelled.

I did a test on this. I did a search on “Rihc Galen”

Google assumed I meant “Rich Galen” and found 3.3 million hits.

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has since said that the redundancies in the immigration
systems are every bit as good as Google’s (my comparison, not hers) but the reason Tsarnaev
got back in was because the FBI alert on him had expired and so his re-entry was not noted.

That “beep-beep-beep” sound you hear is team player Sec. Napolitano backing up the bus
having thrown the FBI under it.

So many questions. How about the wife? She lives in an apartment with – forget about bomb
parts she might not have recognized – how about asking what the hell multiple pressure cookers
were doing in the living room. Were they going into the housewares business?

Ok. That’s the domestic enemies.
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
The New York Times was all over a story that President Barack Obama’s off-handed remark
last summer that if Syrian president Bashar al-Assad used or moved chemical weapons that
would be “a red line for us.”

Just about everyone now believes Assad has used poison gas and is, in fact, consolidating his
stores of chemical weapons – moving them around.

One unnamed high Obama Administration source, attempting to erase, or at least blur, the “red
line” was quoting in the Times as saying,
“If he drops sarin [gas] on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?”

This is known as the Lucky Lindy theory of geopolitics.

Obama (nor anyone else) is eager to get involved in another Middle Eastern war, but his own
off-the-cuff language may have put the United States into a diplomatic, military and/or legal
box.

Then there are the enemies foreign and domestic.

CBS reporter Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation,” said Greg Hicks, a 22-year foreign service
diplomat who was the highest-ranking U.S. official in Libya after the strike has told
Congressional investigators,
“I thought it was a terrorist attack from the get-go. I think everybody in the mission thought
it was a terrorist attack from the beginning.

CBS News reminds us on its website that the very morning the U.N. Ambassador was racing
from Sunday show to Sunday show to claim the attack was a spontaneous demonstration that
got out of hand,
“President of Libya Mohammed al-Magariaf, said his government had ‘no doubt that this
was preplanned, predetermined.’

Al-Magariaf said that on “Face the Nation” moments before Amb. Rice came on to flatly
contradict him.

Why? Because Obama was in the midst of a Presidential campaign and did not want to give
Republicans a chance to say that all of his attempts to avoid the Bushian phrase “war on terror”
had emboldened the terrorists to attack the U.S. compound in Libya.

NBC reported only a week after Obama’s inauguration in 2009 that the “War on Terror Phrase
[was] Fading in new Administration. Obama was using snappy language like: “The enduring
struggle against terrorism and extremism” even back then.

This second term is off to a very, very rocky start and the Ship of State is tippy because of the
incompetence of Obama’s own people.

On the <a href = “http://www.mullings.com/dr_05-06-13.htm”> <b>Secret Decoder
Ring</b></a> page today: Ton’s of links today, including one explaining that “Lucky Lindy”
crack. Also a modestly amusing Mullfoto.
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