The Bracken Anthology (16 page)

In normal times our urban inhabitants are free to come and go at will. But cities are usually divided into manageable sections by highways, railroad trunk lines, rivers, ravines, steep mountainsides and other manmade or geographical features. The authorities, or those living in areas adjoining the boroughs experiencing starvation, may or may not permit free entry or passage of hungry refugees. If the authorities or suburban vigilantes wish to stop the breakout of the starving masses, it will have to be done with extreme force, if it can be done at all.

Roughly, these are the three alternatives facing those who find themselves in an urban area when the outside supply of food stops:

1. Die in place
like the neglected horses or the felines trapped in the crazy old cat lady's house of horrors. This only happens to captive populations, but it happens. Some armed force might be guarding the bridges and highways around your 'hood, with strict orders to "contain the problem." The Warsaw Ghetto could become the model for ultimate urban renewal and a radical rebalancing of the moocher-to-producer population ratio. As with the crazy old cat lady's putrid house, fire may be the cleanser of choice. Again, read about The Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922.

2. Attempt relocation too late,
like the lemmings and the hippos. This was the fate of many of the Jews in Germany, the Armenians and Greeks in Turkey, and the Christians in the Middle East today. The human normalcy bias is so strong that it's difficult for most people to understand, after a few peaceful generations, that bad can go to worse and then to fatal in a few unexpected jumps. Jews, Armenians and Greeks all clung to the belief that things could only get better—until it was too late to flee successfully. The Copts in Egypt may be the next population of Christians marched into a desert to die, while the world watches.

3. Break out,
like the bamboo forest rats and the locusts in search of more nutrition in the next valley. But don't expect to be welcomed in the next county if you are forced into a mass refugee exodus. Instead, you will be considered a plague of hungry locusts, and locusts are exterminated whenever possible. When you move into the hinterland you may find crude signs posted stating that Trespassers Will Be Shot On Sight. Signs put up by very serious hard-eyed people with more scoped deer rifles than EBT cards among them.

It will now be pointed out that there are more rural than urban users of the EBT system. This may be true in absolute numbers, but it is not important. There is a reason why the parables in this essay focus on situations where population densities are high when the food-rug is pulled out from under. Out in the wider country, there is a likelihood of the former EBT user moving in with other rural kin. Truck gardens and farmer's markets are not such a distant memory, and arable land is plentiful. A deer or a pig might wind up over a fire. "A country boy can survive," to quote one modern philosopher.

But there will be no surviving within the urban death traps when the seemingly perpetual food conveyor grinds to a halt for any of a number of causes. The only question is, will the EBT urban plantation slaves die in place, penned in by suburban rifle fire or other means, or will they break out in a starving flood? Possibly even with government help, on government buses? To be taken to whatever wire-fenced FEMA camp enclosure awaits them—or perhaps to your local high schools as a "temporary" measure?

Either way, what an unholy mess we find ourselves in. Our urban plantation population of EBT slaves has become a Damocles Sword hanging above the greater society. That perpetual food conveyor had better not experience a hiccup—for any reason—or in an eye blink there will be unholy hell to pay. Wise citizens will carefully consider the meta-terrain around them for future Black Swans, Black Swans that in reality might be located at the intersections of already understood natural phenomena and the unintended consequences of social experimentation gone disastrously wrong.

The final moral of the story: Don't live in—or near—a densely populated enclosure where all the food is brought in from outside, even if today the exit doors are all open. Link to “The CW2 Cube: mapping the meta-terrain of Civil War 2”

(And now I will be called the usual pejoratives by the usual politically correct imbeciles, who would condemn a child for noticing that a too-swiftly receding ocean tide might be a tsunami warning. "Don't ever mention tsunamis!" the imbeciles will shout. "It is forbidden! Tabu! Haram! If you mention tsunamis, you will bring them!" Wise people ignore these imbeciles and press on with learning, and warning.)

#15

November 2012

Benghazi’s Smoking Gun?

Only President Can Give ‘Cross-Border Authority’

PJ Media, November 2, 2012

The Benghazi debacle boils down to a single key factor — the granting or withholding of “cross-border authority.” This opinion is informed by my experience as a Navy SEAL officer who took a NavSpecWar Detachment to Beirut in 1983.

Once the alarm is sent  – in this case, from the consulate in Benghazi — dozens of HQs are notified and are in the planning loop in real time, including AFRICOM and EUCOM, both located in Germany. Without waiting for specific orders from Washington, they begin planning and executing rescue operations, including moving personnel, ships, and aircraft forward toward the location of the crisis. However, there is one thing they can’t do without explicit orders from the president: cross an international border on a hostile mission.

That is the clear “red line” in this type of a crisis situation.

No administration wants to stumble into a war because a jet jockey in hot pursuit (or a mixed-up SEAL squad in a rubber boat) strays into hostile territory. Because of this,
only the president
can give the order for our military to cross a nation’s border without that nation’s permission. For the Osama bin Laden mission, President Obama granted CBA for our forces to enter Pakistani airspace.

On the other side of the CBA coin: in order to
prevent
a military rescue in Benghazi, all the POTUS has to do is
not
grant cross-border authority. If he does not, the entire rescue mission (already in progress) must stop in its tracks.

Ships can loiter on station, but airplanes fall out of the sky, so they must be redirected to an air base (Sigonella, in Sicily) to await the POTUS decision on granting CBA. If the decision to grant CBA never comes, the besieged diplomatic outpost in Benghazi can rely only on assets already “in country” in Libya — such as the Tripoli quick reaction force and the Predator drones. These assets can be put into action on the independent authority of the acting ambassador or CIA station chief in Tripoli. They are already “in country,” so CBA rules do not apply to them.

How might this process have played out in the White House?

If, at the 5:00 p.m. Oval Office meeting with Defense Secretary Panetta and Vice President Biden, President Obama said about Benghazi: “I think we should not go the military action route,” meaning that no CBA will be granted, then that is it. Case closed. Another possibility is that the president might have said: “We should do what we can to help them … but no military intervention from outside of Libya.” Those words then constitute “standing orders” all the way down the chain of command, via Panetta and General Dempsey to General Ham and the subordinate commanders who are already gearing up to rescue the besieged outpost.

When that meeting took place, it may have seemed as if the consulate attack was over, so President Obama might have thought the situation would stabilize on its own from that point forward. If he then goes upstairs to the family quarters, or otherwise makes himself “unavailable,” then his last standing orders will continue to stand until he changes them, even if he goes to sleep until the morning of September 12.

Nobody in the chain of command below President Obama can countermand his “standing orders” not to send outside military forces into Libyan air space. Nobody. Not Leon Panetta, not Hillary Clinton, not General Dempsey, and not General Ham in Stuttgart, Germany, who is in charge of the forces staging in Sigonella.

Perhaps the president left “no outside military intervention, no cross-border authority” standing orders, and then made himself scarce to those below him seeking further guidance, clarification, or modified orders. Or perhaps he was in the Situation Room watching the Predator videos in live time for all seven hours. We don’t yet know where the president was hour by hour.

But this is 100 percent sure: Panetta and Dempsey would have executed a rescue mission order if the president had given those orders.

And like the former SEALs in Benghazi, General Ham and all of the troops under him would have been straining forward in their harnesses, ready to go into battle to save American lives.

The execute orders would be given verbally to General Ham at AFRICOM in Stuttgart, but they would immediately be backed up in official message traffic for the official record. That is why cross-border authority is the King Arthur’s Sword for understanding Benghazi. The POTUS and only the POTUS can pull out that sword.

We can be 100% certain that cross-border authority was never given. How do I know this? Because if CBA was granted and the rescue mission execute orders were handed down, irrefutable records exist today in at least a dozen involved component commands, and probably many more. No general or admiral will risk being hung out to dry for undertaking a mission-gone-wrong that the POTUS later disavows ordering, and instead blames on “loose cannons” or “rogue officers” exceeding their authority. No general or admiral will order U.S. armed forces to cross an international border on a hostile mission unless and until he is certain that the National Command Authority, in the person of the POTUS and his chain of command, has clearly and explicitly given that order: verbally at the outset, but thereafter in written orders and official messages. If they exist, they could be produced today.

When it comes to granting cross-border authority, there are no presidential mumblings or musings to paraphrase or decipher. If you hear confusion over parsed statements given as an excuse for Benghazi, then you are hearing lies. I am sure that hundreds of active-duty military officers know all about the Benghazi execute orders (or the lack thereof), and I am impatiently waiting for one of them to come forward to risk his career and pension as a whistleblower.

Leon Panetta is falling on his sword for President Obama with his absurd-on-its-face, “the U.S. military doesn’t do risky things”-defense of his shameful no-rescue policy. Panetta is utterly destroying his reputation. General Dempsey joins Panetta on the same sword with his tacit agreement by silence. But why? How far does loyalty extend when it comes to covering up gross dereliction of duty by the president?

General Petraeus, however, has indirectly blown the whistle. He was probably “used” in some way early in the cover-up with the purported CIA intel link to the Mohammed video, and now he feels burned. So he conclusively said via his public affairs officer that the stand-down order did not come from the CIA. Well — what outranks the CIA? Only the national security team at the White House. That means President Obama, and nobody else. Petraeus is naming Obama without naming him. If that is not quite as courageous as blowing a whistle, it is far better than the disgraceful behavior of Panetta and Dempsey.

We do not know the facts for certain, but we do know that the rescue mission stand-down issue revolves around the granting or withholding of cross-border authority, which belongs only to President Obama. More than one hundred gung-ho Force Recon Marines were waiting on the tarmac in Sigonella, just two hours away for the launch order that never came.

#16

January 2013

Dear Mr. Security Agent,

Federal, state, or local. You, the man or woman with the badge, the sworn LEO or FLEA and those who inhabit the many law enforcement niches in between and on all sides. This essay is directed to you, because in the end, how this turmoil about gun control turns out will depend largely upon your decisions and actions over the coming months and years.

I sincerely wish that members of Congress—who may soon be voting on new gun control measures—would read this essay, but I realize that’s a pipe dream, considering the impenetrable bubbles around those exalted entities. So I’ll settle for you, Mr. (or Ms.) Security Agent, since you already gobble up everything on the internet, and I don’t have to seek you out.

A decade ago I wrote the novel
Enemies Foreign and Domestic
, a tale about how tragic events involving the misuse of firearms can be used by an evil administration to misinform and mold public opinion to support its malign anti-freedom policies.

No, my novel was not predicting
“Operation Fast and Furious”
a decade before that covert policy of “pursuing gun control under the radar,” (which was President Obama’s explanation to Sarah Brady for his lack of overt political action). That inter-agency gun-walking policy, remember, resulted in the deaths of over four hundred Mexicans and two U.S. federal agents, murdered in an effort to discredit the Second Amendment and lead to more restrictive gun control laws in America. (If Nixon—or any Republican, for that matter—were in office, the intentional bloodbath would be called
Murdergate
, but today’s collaborating Woodwards and Bernsteins are in on the cover-up.)