How The White House Smothered The News Of Obama's Trip To Afghanistan

buzzfeed.com ^ | May 1, 2012 | Zeke Miller

[Berlin_Freeper]

...By 9:37, the New York Post had published an item on the trip based off the TOLONews tweet, and by 9:53 it was running in the ticker “Breaking News” at the top of its home page. By 10:06 the story was updated to add the “strong” White House denial and minutes later the breaking news alert was removed from the homepage. Sometime in the interim, the initial tweet from TOLONews was removed as well.

[Berlin_Freeper]

I caught the tweet from the New York Post(which was deleted) and posted it to FR.

Obama's campaign can't pull a fast one by FR! :)

[Berlin_Freeper]

Barack Obama Threat Stream

[Truth29]

So the White House lied - business as usual. It has become difficult to believe anything without independent, usually foreign, source confirmation.

[C210N]

I don’t begrudge the executive “machine” keeping the president safe while in transit.

OTOH, I fully expect this pResident to USE this practice, and to be more specific, PLAN AND USE a breech of this practice, to augment the story of the “Wartime President” (but, of course, in this case, pResident).

[Berlin_Freeper]

It was nothing but a campaign stunt. The campaign didn’t want reality and conservative commentators to interfere with the electioneering propaganda.

Obama claims “light of a new day” in successfully ending the war and at the same time seeks to control the narrative because he is in a “War-zone”.

[ml/nj]

By 10:06 the story was updated to add the “strong” White House denial

In other words, they LIED.

ML/NJ

[Pat4ever]

This quote from the NY Post is ominous: “The White House informed the Post today the report on its website that President Obama was in Kabul was not accurate and that, in publishing it, the paper was endangering the President’s life.”
So publishing something against the wishes of the White House = endangering the President’s life? Really? Can you see where this is headed (freedom of speech)? Similar to the recent action banning protests anywhere the Secret Service is working (with the President). Alarming.

[moovova]

Smothered?

Lied!

[Berlin_Freeper]

Excellence Bump

[darrellmaurina]

Agreed.

If this had been President Bush's unannounced visits to Afghanistan or Iraq, many conservatives would have been furious at any media outlet which released information about his presence in-country before he had left.

We don't have to like President Obama, but he is the president and legitimately needs protection from those who want to kill him. Bad presidents need to be defeated at the ballot box, not killed by terrorists.

[FreeAtlanta]

If he didn't want the media to report his little (and costly) campaign stunt, he could have done what Bush did and not told anyone.

Either this administration has less control of the big mouths in and around it, or they wanted the media to report it, while acting all indignant about the reporting.

This administration are all complete frauds.

[FreeAtlanta]

President Bush had more composure and control of intelligence, than Obama. Even President Bush's family didn't know he was taking the Thanksgiving trip to visit the troops in Iraq. I remember when it happened and everyone was stunned and happy - well, except for the commies over at Democrat Underground.

Obama's "team" leaked the information. Otherwise, why not just take off in one of his bazilion Air Force One campaign trips and in route, adjust course for Afghanistan? Hell, he could have planned one of his foreign vacations to Japan or Korea and just diverted to Afghanistan along the way.

This is all a big set up and poorly done at that.

[Biggirl]

Drudgereport did cover the story, but then again, do the taliban even have computers to begin with?

[Biggirl]

At least Bush did it right.

[darrellmaurina]

Free Atlanta, we agree on the way President Bush did this. Operational security was not a minor issue. One caveat, however — we've since learned that VIPs can get into and out of secured zones in Afghanistan fairly easily, and the same was true for Iraq, but that was not at all clear when Bush showed up the first time, or for other VIPs for some time afterward. Our enemies are quite willing to die for their beliefs so they can get their 72 virgins, but that doesn't mean they have the ability to do intelligence work well to know when we plan to have someone important show up.

For BigGirl’s questions about the Taliban having computers: I have no idea how good their computer capabilities may be. All I know is that Army Public Affairs reminds me from time to time that terrorists Google.