Three days after the U.S. Consulate (Special Mission Compound) and the CIA Annex in Bengazi, Libya were attacked on 9/11, the U.S. Embassy in Tunisia was attacked by wacko birds (a pejorative Senator John McCain used in reference to Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul). As Daniel Greenfield points out, Tunisia’s president did more than anyone in a position of power to beat back the attackers.
As hundreds of people swarmed the U.S. embassy in Tunis last Friday afternoon, the phone rang in the office of the country’s President, Moncef Marzouki. It was Hillary Clinton, pleading with him to help secure the American compound, just up the hill from his sprawling seaside palace. So Marzouki played a risky political card: he dispatched his presidential guards to the embassy, effectively muscling in on the country’s military and police forces — a show of strength in an intense power struggle between secular Tunisians like himself and the Islamic party that dominates the government.
Recently, Tunisia ushered in a new Prime Minister named Ali Larayedh, who replaced Hamadi Jebali. McCain visited Tunisia this week and stood shoulder to shoulder with… Larayedh. Prior to becoming PM, Larayedh was Minister of the Interior and certainly did not match Marzouki’s fortitude during the Embassy attack on 9/14/12.
Greenfield aptly writes:
We don’t know what might have happened in Tunis had Marzouki failed to act. Instead McCain chose to thank a police state thug whose forces are better at knocking out the eyes of labor protesters than stopping Salafists.
Worse still Larayedh shrugged as Tunisia’s one known Benghazi attacker was set free.
So, John McCain gave unwarranted praise and attention to a man who allowed the release of a suspect in the Benghazi attack on 9/11/12 and who did nothing while the U.S. Embassy was attacked on 9/14/12 but dissed the president of Tunisia who deserved far more recognition than what Larayedh received.
John McCain = wacko bird.