You've done it again, McGeough!

ONE wonders why they bother, getting things conveniently wrong that is, when the curious nowadays find it so easy to check. On Sunday in the Silly, intrepid correspondent Paul McGeough set out to present a predictably partisan account of all this recent fuss concerning the sacking of the US consulate in Benghazi, the murder of the American ambassador and three others beside. McGeough, soulmate and recent groom of a Palestinian activist, is rather predictable in reporting on the region’s troubles, which he generally ascribes to the Zionist Entity and its Yankee sponsor. No doubt this makes for a peaceful and loving home life. But sometimes, in order to interpret the wider world as seen from the bearskin rug by the happy couple’s fireplace, facts do tend to get a little mangled.

In that Sunday column, McGeough charts a tangled path through this and the other of what has been quite the can of worms. For example, he seems to regard the central issue of the Benghazi scandal as being that one of the pillaged buildings was occupied by CIA nogoodniks, who were spooking and spying all over the place. Others wonder why talking points were altered and speculate as to Obama’s motives in attempting to present the well organised, 8-hour attack as a spontaneous demonstration prompted by a YouTube video. But McGeough will have none of that, harping about the presence of so many CIA operatives in Benghazi. Here is what he had to say:

Of the more than 30 American officials evacuated from Benghazi following the deadly assault, only seven worked for the State Department. Nearly all the rest worked for the CIA, under diplomatic cover, which was a principal purpose of the consulate, these officials said.

Whoops! Sorry about that. The paragraph above is actually what the Wall Street had to say in December, but very easily confused with McGeough’s words, which are strikingly similar:

Of more than 30 Americans evacuated from Benghazi after the attack, only seven reportedly were on the State Department payroll. The others all used diplomatic cover for their CIA work, which was the principal purpose of the diplomatic ''post''.

Newlyweds have many distractions, so entertain no harsh thoughts of cutting and pasting on the part of the man with umpteen Walkley Awards. It must have been a moment of preoccupation or coincidence, the purest of coincidences, and nothing more.

Somewhat harder to explain is this snippet, which appears to be all his own work (emphasis added):

...the State Department and Secretary of State Clinton, in particular, were being made to carry the can for the failure to adequately protect what was a CIA operation that, by the nature of its work in tracking Islamist militants and Stinger missiles commandeered from Gaddafi's munitions dumps, was a more likely target than a conventional consulate.

Was the Dance of the Bee being performed as McGeough attempted to write his dispatch, offering much distraction? Or is the Silly’s correspondent simply a dope, immediately assuming that the US had armed a mass murderer because, well, that is what the US does.

When did the US sell Stinger missiles to Gaddafi? Well, they didn’t, not ever, and why would they? Sell shoulder-fired weapons capable of bringing down a jumbo jet to a man with a proven record of, er, bringing down jumbo jets?

What Obama did do, apparently, was give them to the rebels to counteract Gaddafi’s ground-attack planes, and now that the dictator is dead and gone the administration wants them back. The problem was that many of those rebels, especially the weird beards of Ansaral-Sharia, are al Qaeda associates and none too fond of infidels, not even conciliatory ones with the middle name of Hussein. Ambassadors get even shorter shrift.

By next weekend, when McGeough once again explains the world to the dolts at home – the 290,000 of them who still read the Sun-Herald, at any rate – everyone else will have connected the dots and made a startling conclusion:

Obama gave Stingers to al Qaeda! Others are thinking along similar lines.