Well, you could always turn the crackpipe around on them and let them burn their lips. The equipment is available to anyone. Used/refurbished, even.

http://www.testequipmentdepot....

Stream the data realtime to storage in a non-Five-Eyes nation. Maybe Ecuador? They are not too happy with the US/Airstrip One about now.

Strat

And equipment to do the same thing to them is easily obtainable by the public.

http://www.testequipmentdepot....

If it's not illegal for them to do without a judge/warrant then it's not illegal for citizens either. Just make sure to stream the data obtained in realtime to storage located outside the Five Eyes nations.

Strat

No, the CIA reported on outside-the-embassy protests elsewhere, and made some conjecture along those lines in the hours immediately following the event. They (and the FBI, and DoD) briefed the White House (and thus State) on the reality of the event (a planned, organized event run by well armed, hardened militants) not even 24 hours later. But for days and weeks afterwards, the administration continued to try to sell the "It's all because of this vile video, see..." fairy tale. Why? Because that deliberate lie was a better fit with the campaign's "the terrorist are on the run" narrative. It really isn't any more complicated than that.

And you really think that whatever number that other 95% is, it will go down if someone willing to kill himself on a commercial airliner in order to destroy it on approach over a large city no longer has to even wonder if he'll have his bomb found while boarding? If you're going to troll, at least do it in a way that makes it look like you at least take yourself seriously.

Feel free to pop into any of thousands of posts and show me where someone with whom I'm more philosophically aligned has sent someone out to do a stint of serial lying on a matter of plainly obvious fact (a la launching Susan Rice at the weekend talk shows, or Hillary repeating the same stuff days after she's been briefed on details that explicitly illustrate the exact opposite) - upon which I excused/approved. Specifics, please.

But in your imagination, I have? THAT'S how you make it more comfortable, somehow, to process the pre-election BS we're talking about, coming out of the current administration? "I don't like you, so I suspect you'd approve of other people I don't like lying, and saying so while using phrases like 'statistical certainty' is, no matter how lame, the best thing I can think of to try to distract from the administration's campaign of deliberate, purposeful lying on the topic at hand." THAT'S your argument? Very nice.

You're right. Sending out Susan Rice to lie to reporters in an attempt to spin a completely preventable horror show at the consulate so as to prevent it from further tainting an upcoming election ... that's party-neutral. It's pointing out the lies that's partisan, right? Yeah.

So, when the people in the DoD and the CIA say the exact opposite, and point out that at no time did they conclude or tell anyone that the ambassador was killed by a spontaneous protest crowd, you're thinking ... what, exactly? Weeks afterwards, when the administration was still sticking to that narrative, when every agency with info on the matter was telling them the opposite, you're concluding what, exactly?

Regardless, you're deliberately ignoring the concluding pages of the report, which point out the administration's culpability in ignoring the safety of the people deployed there, and the unanswered questions about the actions of the administration during and in the wake of the event. The report doesn't address why the administration continued to lie about the event for days and weeks after they had unassailable intelligence showing the nature of the attacks.

The report does, of course, express the Senate's considerable frustration that the State Department was preventing important people from appearing to testify, and thus preventing inquiry into entire areas related to accountability and the usual who-knew-what-when. They specifically cite a lack of cooperation from the administration, which prevented access to documents, personnel, and the answers to questions they wanted answered. They, the people who wrote the report you're trumpeting, say that political protectionism by the administration prevented discovery of basic facts about what happened before, during, and after the attack.

In short, the "flawed talking points" they identified were ... flawed. And to the extent that they outlined something known "at the time," we're talking about information that was formally revised only hours later ... not that the administration changed their pervasive lie on the subject for days and days, in appearance after appearance, where they continued on with the YouTube video BS. Something that everyone involved knew was crap before the sun set the next day. But you keep patting them on the back, and ignoring the bulk of the conclusions in the report you yourself trotted out.

So what you're saying is we should stop screening for weapons and explosives? Yes or no.

Right, still can't actually address the point. At least you're predictable. Oh no! Someone made a point I don't want to address! Quick, act like a three year old! And do it again! Hilarious.

I'm not making allegations, I'm explaining what happened. The consulate was attacked by a well armed local terrorist franchise that had carefully planned their evening project. Everyone on the US side new within hours (even as it was happening) exactly what had occurred. The White House certainly did. They then went about a deliberate campaign of lying about what happened, because telling the truth about it would have been acknowledging that a key part of their at-the-time ongoing re-election campaign was their narrative about how exactly such terrorist groups were "on the run" and losing their ability to cause trouble. The event demonstrated that their often repeated campaign talking point was either itself a lie, or reflected a remarkably obtuse/naive understanding of what was happening on the ground in places like Libya.

The GP was questioning the existence of a US counter-example of what we see regularly in the Russian/Ukraine mess (where Russia blatantly lies about what's happening on the ground, using all sorts of classical methods in their media, including the professional trolls discussed in TFA). I said that we had a close example that we could examine - where something that happened on the ground and was well understood by everyone in defense and intelligence, right up the food chain to the White House, was never the less lied about for weeks in the service of spinning for the imminent election. They sent people like Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton out to deliberately troll, multiple times, in order to muddy the waters and distract from the fact that what happened was taking the fun out of part of their re-election campaign narrative.

Well, we can get close. US embassies and the like are usually thought of as US soil, though I'm not quite sure how we treat consulates. But when we did have a recent (immediately before an election) planned, coordinated terrorist attack on one (in which a US ambassador was killed, along with three others), the official government reaction was to immediately spin out a transparently phony explanation meant to prop up the administration's campaign narrative about how such terrorists were on the run, and that the attack was actually a result of an insulting YouTube video, and that the locals just couldn't stop themselves from burning and murdering. Does that count? Does extensive lying about it in order to flip the narrative around during the peak of campaign season count, or do they have to actually stage the attack themselves to fit the profile? I think that sending administration officials out to media outlets to repeatedly lie about it, push the known BS into social media and then summarize it later as "what difference, at this point, does it make?" is a pretty good parallel, if not exactly the same model.

It's always interesting to spot the people who cannot address the situation directly, but think they're cool with the 6th-grade ad hominem. Thanks, though, for indirectly pointing out that I'm exactly right in asking what I asked. You couldn't have made it clearer.

The rest of us frogs are over here, if you haven't heard it yet.

So what you're saying is that we should stop doing the things that the TSA does, because there is no longer going to be a problem with people wanting to take weapons onboard aircraft. Or are you saying that it's un-American to use one organization to screen for that sort of thing, but it's perfectly American to let dozens or hundreds of un-coordinated individual companies and organizations do so? Please be specific instead of ranting.

Even though it would help the government perform surveillance, I think most of the money should be plastic chips with RFID. Perhaps down to 25 cent pieces and up to 5 dollars (or maybe more). Sure, I'd have to swap out my wallet for a change purse, but I don't really carry large amounts of cash with me anyways.

It's nice to have some cash on hand when your cellphone's payment system isn't working.