"“violent extremism” has been the preferred euphemism, based on the peculiar belief that any reference to Islam, however attenuated, would offend and perhaps radicalize Muslims around the world."
Black Swans, Icebergs and Benghazi | Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Clifford D. May
23rd May 2013 - Scripps Howard News Service
We now know what actually happened: Self-proclaimed jihadists linked to al-Qaeda planned and carried out an assault on the anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America’s economic and political capitals. We now know that the State Department, the CIA, and the military were ill prepared before the attack, did nothing useful during the attack, and contributed to misrepresentations after the attack.
This has given rise to the suspicion that President Obama, who was in the home stretch of his reelection campaign, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was positioning herself for a campaign in 2016, knew the truth but chose not to tell it — a conspiracy theory.
But is it not also possible that Obama, Clinton, and other senior officials actually did buy the al-Qaeda-is-dead theory that Lynch, Bergen, and others had proffered? The fact that this theory coincided with their interests would only have made it more persuasive. There are reasons why “humans are great at self-delusion.”
In his best-selling book The Black Swan, Taleb endeavors to explain “everything we know about what we don’t know,” with particular emphasis on the impact of the unexpected (e.g. black swans). I suspect he’d say that those prematurely reporting the death of al-Qaeda were confusing “absence of evidence” with “evidence of absence.” We had not suffered an attack on the scale of 9/11 in several years. On that basis, they theorized, neither al-Qaeda nor any other jihadists would ever again be able to stage such an attack, and attacks of lesser lethality need not be a source of great concern.
- See more at: http://defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/black-swans-icebergs-and-benghazi/#sthash.Ot1Jn8WQ.dpuf
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