CBS News Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan, who was sexually assaulted in Egypt during the Arab Spring and overthrowing of then President Hosni Mubarak, shredded the Obama administration and Islamist "apologists" in a recent speech for claims Al Qaeda is weakened. Logan made clear the War on Terror isn't in a downslide and said Islamists are as strong as ever with a willingness to attack Americans.
Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.
“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .” Logan declared in her native South African accent.
The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.
There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”
Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.
She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”
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Logan also touched on Libya and the recent killing of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Logan even called for retribution for the recent terrorist killings of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials. The event is a harbinger of our vulnerability, she said. Logan hopes that America will “exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”
Logan's comments came just weeks after the U.S. flag was ripped down in Egypt and Libya and replaced with the black Al Qaeda flag. The Washington Free Becon is reporting Al Qaeda is essentially setting up shop in Libya in order to fill the power vaccumm during the rebuild of the country.
Pakistan-based al Qaeda is secretly setting up sleeper cells and a clandestine network of jihadists to destabilize and take over Libya while hiding under a new cover name to prevent exposure and attacks, according to an internal Pentagon report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
“Al Qaeda has established a core network in Libya, but it remains clandestine and refrains from using the al Qaeda name,” according to the report produced jointly by the Library of Congress and the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office’s Irregular Warfare Support Program, a unit under the assistant defense secretary for special operations.
The report concludes that al Qaeda poses “a significant threat to the state-building process in Libya.”
The 54-page unclassified report describes al Qaeda—which President Barack Obama recently declared to be in decline—as “seeking to create an al Qaeda clandestine network in Libya that could be activated in the future to destabilize the government and/or to offer logistical support to al Qaeda’s activities in North Africa and the Sahel”—the Sahara desert region stretching across northern Africa.
As a refresher, here is Logan discussing her horrific experience in Egypt.
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