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Deroy Murdock says the blog posts of the leader of the expedition trapped in sea ice give proof the trip was supposed to highlight the lack of sea ice.
Chinese choppers on Thursday evacuated 52 passengers who had been marooned near the South Pole since Christmas Eve aboard the Russian science vessel MS Akademik Shokalsky. It will take far more than helicopters, however, to salvage the theory of so-called “global warming.” It remains trapped in Antarctic ice.
“We’re stuck in our own experiment,” said Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at Australia’s University of New South Wales. The voyage’s leader was no mere guide, and his fellow travelers were not just tourists. While news accounts portrayed these people as star-crossed adventurers, the frustrated Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) was supposed to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south,” Turney explained.
“There is an increasing body of evidence, including by the AAE members, that have identified parts of the East Antarctic which are highly susceptible to melting and collapse from ocean warming,” AAE’s website stated. “We are going south to . . . determine the extent to which human activity and pollution has [sic] directly impacted on this remote region of Antarctica.” …
Newsbusters posts on the media’s lack of interest in the fact the ship was on a “global warming” mission.
A group of climate change scientists were rescued by helicopter Jan. 2, after being stranded in the ice since Christmas morning. But the majority of the broadcast networks’ reports about the ice-locked climate researchers never mentioned climate change.
The Russian ship, Akademic Shokalskiy, was stranded in the ice while on a climate change research expedition, yet nearly 98 percent of network news reports about the stranded researchers failed to mention their mission at all. Forty out of 41 stories (97.5 percent) on the network morning and evening news shows since Dec. 25 failed to mention climate change had anything to do with the expedition.
In fact, rather than point out the mission was to find evidence of climate change, the networks often referred to the stranded people as “passengers,” “trackers” and even “tourists,” without a word about climate change or global warming.
Chris Turney, the expedition’s leader, is a professor of climate change at the University of New South Wales. According to Turney’s personal website, the purpose of the expedition is to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south.” …
The NY Times is involved in a project to help Hillary clear away the Benghazi problem. Andrew McCarthy starts off a look at the controversy.
What was the commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces doing through the night of September 11, 2012, while he knew Americans were under jihadist siege in Libya? You won’t learn the answer to that question by reading the mini-book-length, six-“chapter” revisionist history of the Benghazi massacre cooked up by David D. Kirkpatrick and the New York Times.
The Times report is a labor of love in the service of President Obama and, in particular, the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign ramp-up. Former secretary of state Clinton, of course, was a key architect of Obama’s Libya policy. She was also chiefly responsible for the protection of American personnel in that country, including our murdered ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and the three other Americans killed by Muslim terrorists — State Department technician Sean Smith and a pair of former Navy SEALs, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. Still, the Times is banking on your not noticing that in its laborious 7,500 words, Kirkpatrick’s account utters the word “Clinton” exactly . . . wait for it . . . zero times.
The word “Obama” comes in for a mere six mentions, four of which are impersonal references to the current administration. The other two are telling, though fleeting.
One is a rehearsal of the president’s vow to exact “justice” against anyone found responsible for this “terrible act” of killing four Americans, including the formal representative of our nation. As it happens, the only person on the planet to have felt the lash of Obama’s justice is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the California-based “producer” who filmed the infamous “anti-Mohammed” movie trailer, Innocence of Muslims. In a despicable violation of constitutional free-speech principles, and a bow to sharia blasphemy rules that forbid criticism of Islam, Obama and Clinton publicly portrayed Nakoula and his “film” as the Benghazi culprits — implicitly accepting the Islamic-supremacist premise that verbal insults, no matter how obscure and trifling, justify mass-murder attacks.
In large part, the Times’ autopsy is a futile attempt to breathe new life into this demeaning farce. …
Stephen Hayes of Fox and the Weekly Standard with an exhaustive look.
Let’s start by giving David Kirkpatrick credit. Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief of the New York Times and author of this weekend’s much-discussed piece on Benghazi, provides many new on-the-ground, minute-by-minute details of the attacks and the weeks and months leading up to them. Some of the reporting is incredible. Kirkpatrick describes the vase in the living room of the home belonging to the mother of Abu Khattala, a main suspect in those attacks. He reports on how the fighting in the consulate paused when Abu Khattala entered the compound, a revealing fact. Citing security camera video footage, the author describes how one of the attackers paused amidst the bedlam in the consulate to pour some Hershey’s chocolate syrup down his throat. Kirkpatrick obviously spent considerable time on the ground in Benghazi and interviewed several anti-Western Islamists, including some involved in the attacks. There’s little doubt he took considerable risks as he reported his piece.
While much of Kirkpatrick’s reporting is admirable and while these details add to our knowledge of certain aspects of the attack, they do not tell the whole story. And that’s where the piece ultimately fails.
The piece makes two main claims that challenge much of the previous reporting about Benghazi: 1) The Times asserts that there is “no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault;” and, 2) that the attack “was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”
We’ll focus on the first one.
There is, in fact, evidence that terrorists linked to al Qaeda had a role in the Benghazi attacks. Indeed, there’s a fair amount of that kind of evidence. As Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence put it on Sunday when asked about the Times report: “The intelligence indicates that al Qaeda was involved, …
Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post has a somewhat different take on the Times’ efforts on behalf of Hillary and Barry.
The New York Times just delivered a mortal blow to the Obama administration and its Middle East policy.
Call it fratricide. It was clearly unintentional.
Indeed, is far from clear that the paper realizes what it has done.
Last Saturday the Times published an 8,000-word account by David Kirkpatrick detailing the terrorist strike against the US Consulate and the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. In it, Kirkpatrick tore to shreds the foundations of President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism strategy and his overall policy in the Middle East.
Obama first enunciated those foundations in his June 4, 2009, speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University. Ever since, they have been the rationale behind US counterterror strategy and US Middle East policy.
Obama’s first assertion is that radical Islam is not inherently hostile to the US. As a consequence, America can appease radical Islamists. Moreover, once radical Muslims are appeased, they will become US allies, (replacing the allies the US abandons to appease the radical Muslims).
Obama’s second strategic guidepost is his claim that the only Islamic group that is a bona fide terrorist organization is the faction of al-Qaida directly subordinate to Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Only this group cannot be appeased and must be destroyed through force.
The administration has dubbed the Zawahiri faction of al-Qaida “core al-Qaida.” And anyone who operates in the name of al-Qaida, or any other group that does not have courtroom-certified operational links to Zawahiri, is not really al-Qaida, and therefore, not really a terrorist group or a US enemy.
These foundations have led the US to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan. They are the rationale for the US’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide. They are the basis for Obama’s allegiance to Turkey’s Islamist government, and his early support for the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.
They are the basis for the administration’s kneejerk support for the PLO against Israel.
Obama’s insistent bid to appease Iran, and so enable the mullocracy to complete its nuclear weapons program. is similarly a product of his strategic assumptions. So, too, the US’s current diplomatic engagement of Hezbollah in Lebanon owes to the administration’s conviction that any terror group not directly connected to Zawahiri is a potential US ally. …