Watch Out for Dems' Dishonesty

Jim Gereghty has a great post over at TKS on NRO this morning, showing that you really have to watch everything the Democrats say these days. Russ Feingold was on Meet the Press and was attempting to show that the Bush Administration is ignoring Somalia as that country falls to Islamic terrorists. He states as fact that during his questioning of an Ambassador during a hearing on Somalia last week that official said that the Administration has only one person working on the Somalia crisis. Russert, as usual with Democrats, took him at his word.

Gereghty proves that Feingold intentionally misled Russert and the American people, and neglected to mention what the real problem is in Somalia - that there isn't anyone there that we can work with on a solution:

"Anyway, I was intrigued by this statement by Feingold:

You know, Tim, today it was announced that a guy named Hassan Dahir Aweys is now the head of the government that has taken over in Mogadishu in Somalia. He is on the State Department’s terrorist list. He is known as an al Qaeda operative, or somebody that is connected with al Qaeda. While we were asleep at the switch, while we were bogged down in Iraq, while we were all focused on Iraq as the be all and end all of our American foreign policy, we are losing the battle to al Qaeda because we’re not paying attention. I asked [Coordinator for Counter Terrorism in the State Department] Ambassador [Henry] Crumpton at a hearing the other day, how many people in our federal government are working full time on the problem in Somalia? He said one full time person. We’ve spent $2 million in Somalia in the last year while we’re spending $2 billion a week in Iraq. This is insanity if you think about what the priorities are of those who have attacked us and those who are likely to attack us in the future.

Could that really be true? So I went and checked the transcript on Nexis:

SEN. FEINGOLD: How many people does the State Department have working on Somalia full-time? I just want the full-time figure.

MR. CRUMPTON: Yes, sir. There is one dedicated Foreign Service officer in Nairobi that looks at Somalia, but there are a multitude of others, not just in the State Department but across the U.S. government, that work the issue.

Did Feingold misinterpret Crumpton's statement on Meet the Press? Here's a bit more from Crumpton, from earlier in that hearing:

SEN. FEINGOLD: Somalia is home to terrorist networks and illicit power structures, criminal networks, abject poverty and dire humanitarian conditions. And it's apparent that it demands far more resources and attention than we are providing.

Can you be a little more specific about what you think we need more of for Somalia?

MR. CRUMPTON: We need to have legitimate actors inside Somalia with whom we can work. That's probably the most difficult challenge right now. It is a fractured political entity with competing, conflicting tribal leadership. And we need to help them establish some type of interface, some kind of network, so we can help them right now.

A lot of this depends on the Somalis themselves. And to date they have fallen short. That's probably the most immediate challenge, to see if this fledgling government can establish some degree of legitimacy and some power. And right now they have very little.

SEN. FEINGOLD: In terms of our own governmental role on this, can you talk a little bit about the State Department's role in this effort? Is the State Department the department that's playing a leadership role on Somalia-related policy? And if not, who is?

MR. CRUMPTON: Yes, sir. And this was illustrated most recently when I was in Nairobi. We had ambassadors from the entire region that came to Nairobi to have an in-depth discussion. And I might note, that meeting had been scheduled for a couple of months before these recent events that you're talking about.

But it wasn't only the Department of State. We had representatives from the military; in fact, from OSD, from CENTCOM, from Special Operations Command. We had USAID there. We had NCTC, other elements of the intelligence community; a wide range of interagency. And we came back with some specific policy recommendations. And, yes, the ambassadors in the field had a leadership role. They chaired that meeting.

That's not a bad turnout, considering how there are no U.S. embassies or consulates in Somalia, that the U.S. military does not operate there (reportedly due to the preferences of the State Department) and the CIA was reportedly running funds to militias that opposed the African Courts Union. (That had to be more than a one-man operation.) As Crumpton pointed out, the biggest problem doesn't appear to be a lack of U.S. resources; it appears to be a lack of organized good guys on the ground to work with against the bad guys."