Roy Exum
Around 11 o’clock Monday morning, President Trump sent out one of his now-famous Tweets: “The Democrats and the Fake News are trying to make terrorist Soleimani into a wonderful guy, only because I did what should have been done for 20 years. Anything I do, whether it’s the economy, military, or anything else, will be scorned by the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats!”
For what it’s worth, I totally agree with him. The day before, our Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, sacrificed his Sunday morning by appearing on a couple of the weekly news shows, and the far-left reporters who can’t recognize their flaming bias, pitched their stories in a way that makes me itch.
The resulting headlines were quite similar to that which appeared in The Military Times, “Esper Says He Never Saw Evidence of Threat Against four US Embassies” and my immediate reaction was a very simple, “Who cares?”
What the me-first media in Washington can’t seem to understand is that the best intelligence is the most secretive. Today’s leftists in the news media act like spoiled, insensitive brats and the timeless fact that any breach in our nation’s intelligence can cost American lives has been long forgotten. No reporter, good or bad, has the right to believe those of their stripe – now almost as maligned as this nation’s Congress -- should be granted privy of any sort, most especially in the military realm, and why powerful politicians or government safe-keepers get in mud baths week after week with such slimeballs and their microphones is beyond me.
Had I been in the press gallery, the most salient point in Secretary Esper’s dialogue with CNN’s Jake Tapper was when our Pentagon leader told the network viewers, “I’d rather be here discussing this topic with you, rather than going up to Dover Air Force Base and standing there while flag-draped coffins come home, and I have to explain to husbands and wives, sons and daughters, why their service member died when I had information that could have prevented it,” he said.
I’m of the same belief but what is nauseating to me is what difference does it make if Trump said one embassy was endangered before he upped it to four U.S. consulates. High-level intelligence doesn’t come in a neatly wrapped parcel with your daily newspaper. Usually it is the result or many strings and threads -- many minor and weak and even misleading until some CIA expert or military command interprets what is real and what it not.
Secretary Esper was well between his boundaries when he told reporters he had not seen any evidence the now-droned-and-dead Iranian thug General Qasem Soleimani was planning more attacks on the U.S., but it is a given cinch Esper knew far more than he was about to reveal on some Sunday morning folly to a pair of liberals whose agendas are far from his own.. Let’s look at an excerpt of Meghann Meyer’s version of double-speak that just appeared in the Military Times:
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Esper told CBS’s Margaret Brennan that his opinion wasn’t based on any specific intelligence citing threats against four embassies. “I didn’t see one, with regard to the four embassies,” he said. “My expectation was, they were probably going to go after our embassies.”
“Probably” and “could have been,” Brennan said quoting Esper, sounded more like assessments than evidence. “Well, the president didn’t say? He didn’t cite a specific piece of evidence,” Esper said.
(Later on Sunday morning) Esper told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he also believed multiple embassies were under threat.
“What the president said with regard to the four embassies is what I believe as well,” Esper said. “He said he believed that they probably could have been targeting the embassies in the region. I believe that as well, as did other national security team members.”
Esper declined to cite any specific intelligence about the threats. Tapper countered that the president had shared the threats publicly, including on Fox News.
“The president said very publicly that he believed - believed is not the same as evidence,” Tapper said.
But the president was not citing intelligence when he said he believed in the threat, Esper countered. Members of the administration briefed Congress about the Soleimani killing and the threats he posed to Americans, but many - on both sides of the aisle - denounced the briefing as vague and dissatisfying, and have since come out to say they were never told that four embassies were at risk.
“Why is Trump telling this to Fox News, but the administration is not briefing Congress on this threat of four embassies, unless there was actually no specific intelligence that there was a threat to four embassies?” Tapper said.
Senior members of the House and Senate, as well as the top leaders of their intelligence committees, were given all of the classified details, Esper said. “The bottom line is, we had exquisite intelligence that can only be shared with the Gang of Eight, so I understand the frustration of many members of Congress,” he added. “I’m not going to go into details of what they were briefed, partly because I wasn’t there.”
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Do you see how that works? The Secretary of Defense threw an excuse of ‘I wasn’t there,” when any lamebrain can swear Mark Esper knew exactly what those briefings included. The same is true of Trump. When he Tweeted yesterday morning, “ … Anything I do, whether it’s the economy, military, or anything else, will be scorned by the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats!” Our POTUS already knew there are very few adults in America who do not already know that’s true. Yesterday he knew exactly what he was doing.
royexum@aol.com