There’s a Lot of ‘There’ There

20121029_LIBYA_obama_hillary_Clinton

 

Here’s the thing:  America must not allow Benghazi or Boston or the next Jihadi obscenity to be about “getting” Hillary Clinton or Obama or any other American. Such self-defeating rot is a goal right out of the Islamists’ playbook.  Benghazi showcases, more than anything else, the inefficacy of our present national security effort.

 

by CAPT. GARY HARRINGTON, US NAVY (RET.)

President Obama, at a May 13, 2013 press conference, explained there’s no “there” there in defending his administration regarding the events surrounding four American deaths in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.  Without a “there” there, that would signal to Congress that their criticism is groundless. But the evidence shows…not so fast, President Obama. Not only was there a “there” there, I propose the “there” was born of an unholy Immaculate Conception.

“You’d better not go into the woods” has been the administration’s refrain in the Benghazi narrative. This theme, from a popular child’s song, is apt since, “If you do, you’re sure of a big surprise because that’s where Teddy Bears have their picnics.”  The Benghazi Jihadi terrorists, not stuffed animals, have long planned “beneath the trees where nobody sees.”  In fact, their plans have influenced our government immensely, having caused this administration to fall for the Jihadi strategy. This is best seen in our recent purge of Islamist words – amazingly – from our own government’s military training materials. This prevailing correctness about language fosters deception, and this lies at the core of the Benghazi story.   “They hide and seek as long as they please…”

Toxic ideological picnics began with medieval Wahhabi and Salafi ideas that aren’t well studied, known or discussed in polite society or in press conferences, which makes them easy to obfuscate.  So to avoid a “big surprise” on the ideological origins of Benghazi, high government officials conceived a not-so-Immaculate Conception:  the You Tube video cover story.  The sperm was Salafi jihad.  The egg was a transnational progressive idea gone bad on the eve of a national election: the “normalization” of Benghazi.  A politically inconvenient truth about a Jihadi attack was deliberately blurred to protect a setback to a State Department pet project.

A forest and tree cliché is helpful to better conceive the Immaculate Conception. Benghazi is but one tree in the mature, mutating Jihadi forest.  We noticed the Bomb-the-U.S.-Homeland tree at the Boston marathon finish line, as we did earlier the other U.S. Homeland trees of Ft. Hood and Times Square.  In the heart of the forest lie the remains of older trees, some U.S Homeland and some international: the 9/11 tree, the original World Trade Towers tree, the USS Cole, the Marine Barracks and so on. The ghosts of Danny Pearl, Theo Van Gogh, Boston’s little Martin Richard, Ambassador Stevens, Colonel Higgins, Navy Diver Stethem, and so many others, wander “there.”  Aisha’s missing nose is buried “there.”  “There” is a transnational Jihadi forest that makes it hard for some political leaders to see – or even want to see – the trees that comprise it.

Weeds flourish on untended ground and they distract from the clear picture of the forest. They include the variegated flora of parsed talking points (such as “sideshows”), jailed patsy blasphemers, denied State Department Forward Emergency Support Teams (FEST), fired and demoted officials (some innocent of any wrongdoing), FBI, ICE and State Foot Draggers, AP definitions reset, and other troublesome mutants. The lexicon of the forest does not take rocket science to fathom.  We must explore and study it precisely because “tired little teddy bears” in high office have refused to define Islamist strategies and their undergrowth of motivating medieval ideas for decades.  We need to do it for ourselves.

Once the forest clears, you begin to recognize the patterns of the trees in daily headlines, and “catch them unaware” on Oped pages.  Author Dr. Walid Phares has defined these patterns as six distinct Jihadi strategies: Economic, Ideological, Political, Intelligence, Subversive, and Diplomatic.

Read more: Family Security Matters 

Obama Uses Terror-Finance Group to Push Gun Control

islamic-society-of-north-america-isna-annual-convention-2012_315x256By :

The Obama Administration’s relationship with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity, has grown beyond strictly Muslim-related issues. On May 6, Vice President Biden met with about 20 interfaith leaders including ISNA President Mohamed Magid for two hours to rally religious support for gun control.

A FBI source identified ISNA as a Muslim Brotherhood front as early as 1987. A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo identified ISNA as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends” for use in its “work in America as a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

Federal prosecutors labeled ISNA an unindicted co-conspirator in the terrorism-financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation, a Brotherhood “charity” housed within the ISNA building that was found to be financing Hamas. The U.S. government specifically called ISNA a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity.

The President of ISNA is Imam Mohamed Magid. In 2004, he reacted to the U.S. government’s investigations and prosecutions of groups like the Holy Land Foundation by claiming they were part of an anti-Muslim agenda. He said that parts of the U.S. government are “intent on dismantling Muslim organizations and bringing them down.”

He was among those that met with Vice President Biden to discuss the legislation mandating background checks for gun sales. Several more Obama Administration officials including Biden’s chief of staff were also there.

Other interfaith leaders at the meeting included Franklin Graham of Billy Graham Evangelistic Association; Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religion Action Center of Reform Judaism; Barrett Duke of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission; Pastor Michael McBride of PICO National Network and Richard Cizik of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good.

Gun control isn’t the only political issue that the Obama Administration seeks ISNA’s support on. On March 8, Magid met with President Obama and senior advisor Valerie Jarrett for 90 minutes about immigration reform. About 10 other interfaith leaders were there. Only three days later, Magid again met with President Obama to offer “recommendations” for his trip to the Middle East.

Magid also was a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group and the Faith-based Security and Communications Advisory Committee. His group also met with the FBI Director regarding the agency’s review of its counter-terrorism training materials.

The Obama Administration treats ISNA as the leader of the Muslim-American community, even though only 4% of Muslim-American males and 7% of females chose ISNA as the group that best represents them in a 2011 poll. In March, the Associate Director of the Office of Public Engagement said ISNA is his top Muslim outreach partner.

Read more at Front Page

Obama and the “Official Truth”

tea_party-thumb-470x313-3102By Caroline Glick:

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been sitting in a US federal prison in Texas since his photographed midnight arrest by half a dozen deputy sheriffs at his home in California for violating the terms of his parole. As many reporters have noted, the parole violation in question would not generally lead to anything more than a court hearing.

But in Nakoula’s case, it led to a year in a federal penitentiary. Because he wasn’t really arrested for violating the terms of his parole.

Nakoula was arrested for producing an anti- Islam film that the Obama administration was falsely blaming for the al-Qaida assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi and the brutal murder of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on September 11, 2012. Obama and his associates falsely blamed Nakoula’s film – and scapegoated Nakoula – for inciting the al-Qaida attack in Benghazi because they needed a fall guy to pin their cover-up of the actual circumstances of the premeditated, eminently foreseeable attack, which took place at the height of the presidential election campaign.

With the flood of scandals now inundating the White House, many are wondering if there is a connection between the cover-up of Benghazi, the IRS’s prejudicial treatment of non-leftist nonprofit organizations and political donors, the Environmental Protection Agency’s prejudicial treatment of non-liberal organizations, and the Justice Department’s subpoenaing of phone records of up to a hundred reporters and editors from the Associated Press.

On the surface, they seem like unrelated events.

But they are not. They expose the modus operandi of the Obama administration: To establish an “official truth” about all issues and events, and use the powers of the federal government to punish all those who question or expose the fraudulence of that “official truth.”

From the outset of Obama’s tenure in office, his signature foreign policy has been his strategy of appeasing jihadist groups and regimes like the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran at the expense of US allies, including Israel, the Egyptian military, and longtime leaders like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.

The administration defended its strategy in various ways. It presented the assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs as the denouement of the US war on terror. By killing the al-Qaida chief, the administration claimed, it had effectively ended the problem of jihad, which it reduced to al-Qaida generally and its founder specifically.

Just as important, it has tried to hide the very existence of the jihadist threat. To this end, the administration purged all terms relevant to the discussion of jihadist Islam from the federal lexicon and fired officials who defied the language and subject ban.

It has hidden the jihadist motive of terrorists and information relating to known jihadists from relevant governmental bodies. The Benghazi cover-up is the most blatant example of this policy of obfuscating and denying the truth. But it is far from a unique occurrence.

For instance, the administration has stubbornly denied that Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan’s massacre of his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood in Texas was a jihadist attack. And in the months preceding the Tsarnaev brother’s bombing of the Boston Marathon, and in its immediate aftermath, the FBI did not share its long-held information about the older brother’s jihadist activities with local law enforcement agencies.

To advance its “official truth,” the administration leaked information to the media about top secret operations that advanced its official narrative. For instance, top administration officials leaked the story of the Stuxnet computer virus that compromised Iranian computers used by Iran’s nuclear weapons program. These stories compromised ongoing US and Israeli intelligence operations. But they advanced the administration’s foreign policy narrative.

Conversely, as the AP scandal shows, the administration went on fishing expeditions to root out those who leaked stories that harmed the administration’s narrative that al-Qaida is a spent force. In May 2012, AP reported that the CIA had scuttled an al-Qaida plot in Yemen to bomb a US airliner. The story damaged the credibility of Obama’s claim that al-Qaida was defeated, and challenged the wisdom of Obama’s support for the al-Qaida-aligned antiregime protesters in Yemen that ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh in November 2011.

Finally, the administration has promoted its policy by demonizing as extremists and bigoted every significant voice that called that policy into question.

For example, in his satirical speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner last month, Obama snidely – and libelously – accused Rep. Michele Bachmann of “book burning.”

Bachmann is an outspoken critic of Obama’s policy of appeasing Islamists at the expense of America’s allies.

Bachmann is also the chairwoman of the House of Representative’s Tea Party caucus. And demonizing her is just one instance of what has emerged as the administration’s tool of choice in its bid to marginalize its opponents. This practice arguably began during Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign when then-senator Obama referred to his opponents as “bitter” souls who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to those who aren’t like them.”

In the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, Obama and his supportive media characterized the grassroots Tea Party movement for limited government as racist, selfish, extremist and uncaring.

And now we have learned that beginning in March 2010, the Internal Revenue Service instituted what can only be considered a systemic policy of discriminating against nonprofit groups dedicated to fighting Obama’s domestic agenda. The IRS demanded information about the groups’ donors, worldviews, reading materials and social networking accounts, and personal information about its membership and leaders that it had no right to receive. And according to USA Today, it held up approval of nonprofit status for 27 months for all groups related to the Tea Party movement. Some 500 organizations were victimized by this abuse of power.

 

Afghanistan’s Benghazi: Grieving Families Want Answers

CH-47_Chinook_flying_night_visionBy Diana West:

Grief and politics don’t mix. When raw, aching grief and the dirtiest kind of politics meet, a hot volcano of pain and outrage erupts that is unstoppable. But it is necessary. It is the only way things might ever be clean again.

I am thinking of recent casket transfer ceremonies that have taken place at Dover Air Force Base, where senior administration officials have used the solemn occasions – Benghazi, the shoot-down of Extortion 17 – less to comfort grieving families than to lay blame, to establish a narrative, to lie.

Think of Sean Smith’s mother. Think of Tyrone Woods’ father. After the Obama administration’s hugs came the Obama administration’s stonewalling. They still don’t have answers about what happened in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012.

We don’t either.

We still don’t know who in the U.S. government gave the order not to rescue Americans under fire for eight and a half hours, and how and why such an unconscionable order was given. We still don’t know who convinced senior White House officials to tell grieving parents meeting their children’s caskets that a video-maker, not jihad against the West, was to blame for the assault that took four American lives – or what the political motivation was.

This is a national disgrace.

But before Benghazi, there was Extortion 17, the call sign of a Special Operations mission in Afghanistan on Aug. 6, 2011. Three months after the strike on Osama bin Laden, 30 Americans – including 15 from the bin Laden strike-team unit, Navy SEAL Team 6, and two other SEALs – were killed in the costliest single-day loss for the U.S. military in the Afghanistan war, and the largest SEAL loss ever. A “lucky shot” in the dark brought down the old CH-47 Chinook helicopter attempting to land them in the middle of an ongoing battle in Wardak Province. Or so the U.S. military claims. The families are not so sure.

Then again, they’re not sure about anything. The runaround, the lies, the callous disregard they have received at the hands of the government and military is similar to Benghazi, maybe worse.

“We go to Dover to see bodies, and we’re all in the hangar down there,” Charles Strange, father of slain SEAL Michael Strange, recalled last week before a rapt audience at the National Press Club, where several Extortion 17 families gathered to call on Congress to investigate. “And President Obama comes up to me and he says, ‘Mr. Strange’ – and he grabs me by the shoulders – ‘Michael changed the way America lives.’ I grabbed Mr. President by the shoulders and I said: ‘I don’t need to know about my son, I need to know what happened, Mr. President.’

Strange continued. “The Secret Service guys grabbed me. I’m crying. He went to give me a hug. I whispered in his ear: ‘Mr. President, Is there going to be a congressional inquiry?’ And Mr. President whispered in my ear – and I could feel his lips touch – and he said, ‘Mr. Strange, we’re going to look into this very, very, very deep.’ Well, I haven’t heard nothing.”

Nothing that makes sense, anyway. A military investigation led by then-Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Colt (since promoted to major general) tells us there was no “eye in the sky” that night. Why not? No forces had been sent in to prepare the area. Why not?

More sickening was the fact that rules of engagement prevented suppressive fire from being aimed at the tower firing on the Chinook. Billy Vaughn, father of slain SEAL Aaron Vaughn, recalled how a three-star admiral explained this breach to the grieving families: U.S. forces couldn’t fire back, the admiral said, because “we want to win hearts and minds.” As Mr. Strange later put it: “What about my heart? What about my mind?”

American hearts and minds don’t count with this U.S. government – and that is our national tragedy until we change the government.

What commander is responsible for assembling so many SEALs in one inadequate aircraft, for this particular landing site, for a mission many believe was in fact unnecessary? Extortion 17 took off three months after the strike on bin Laden, three months after the Obama administration blew SEAL Team 6′s cover in the bin Laden raid, three months after intelligence indicated the Taliban were out for revenge. “The chain of command” was responsible, the families were told. Who were they? No answer.

Why was there no gunship escort that night? What happened in the final minutes of Extortion 17? The black box was never recovered, the military insists. Really? What about the seven Afghan soldiers who joined the mission at the last minute, replacing Afghans previously scheduled to fly? No one knows the identities of this last-minute group, or why they flew that day. More troubling still, military investigators didn’t interview Afghan commanders to find out.

Why not? To win their “hearts and minds,” too? The word for that is “submission.” Such submission also explains the appalling inclusion of an imam at the casket transfer ceremony in Afghanistan – a ceremony preceding the transport of the dead bodies, American and Afghan, to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where they would finally be identified. (This makes families wonder whether American sons lay in caskets draped with the Afghan flag.) There, in the midst of an otherwise ecumenical ceremony (devoid of any mention of Jesus Christ), the imam invoked Allah, while establishing that Muslims reside in heaven and non-Muslims reside in hell.

Standard Islamic fare, to be sure, but this is the same supremacist basis of the jihad that killed the men of Extortion 17. No wonder the families are doubly outraged.

As should we all be. Congress must investigate Extortion 17 and find out exactly what happened, and who bears responsibility. It is the very least we can do for our people.

Tell Me Again Why U.S. Used Jihadists to Guard Benghazi?

20130503_benghazi_libya_clinton_obama_LARGEBy Diana West:

“I want to ask a couple of questions about the February 17 Martyrs Brigade,” said Rep. Blake Farenthold.

The Texas Republican was addressing the three State Department “whistleblowers” who testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. The three witnesses were Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for counterterrorism; Greg Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in Libya; and Eric Nordstrom, former regional security officer in Libya.

When Farenthold introduced this crucial subject into the hearings, he also opened a window into Benghazi that shone light not only on disastrous Western support for “Arab Spring,” but also on the core crisis in U.S. foreign policy.

Farenthold: “Mr. Nordstrom, can you tell me the role of February 17 Martyrs Brigade in protecting the consulate in Benghazi?”

Nordstrom: “Certainly. That was the unit, for lack of a better term, that was provided to us by the Libyan government.”

This already was news to me: The Libyan government provided known jihadists to guard U.S. interests?

On second thought, there is nothing fantastic about this when – or, rather, if – we consider that the U.S. government supported an army of known jihadists in its revolution against Libya’s anti-jihadist former leader Moammar Gadhafi. I say “if” because I don’t expect even the members of the committee to see the “Arab Spring” this way. Uncle Sam’s open support for jihad is an epic scandal that is never even acknowledged.

Farenthold: “Were you aware of any ties by that militia to Islamic extremists?”

Nordstrom: “Absolutely. Yeah, we had that discussion on a number of occasions, the last of which was when there was a Facebook posting of a threat that named Ambassador Stevens and Sen. (John) McCain, who was coming out for the elections. That was in the July (2012) time frame. I met with some of my agents and also some (CIA) annex personnel, and we discussed that.”

More news: Nordstrom seems to be saying that the February 17 Martyrs Brigade actually threatened both the U.S. ambassador and a U.S. senator – and still served as U.S. security guards. This is shocking to read in black and white, although, again, when it becomes clear that Uncle Sam supported the same, exact jihad in Libya that al-Qaida supported, it makes, if not sense exactly, then certainly a pattern.

Farenthold: “Mr. Hicks, you were in Libya on the night of the attack. Do you believe the February 17 militia played a role in those attacks, was complicit in those attacks?”

Hicks: “Certainly, elements of that militia were complicit in the attacks. The attackers had to make a long approach march through multiple checkpoints that were manned by February 17 militia.”

More news: Most media accounts identified al-Qaida-linked Ansar al-Sharia (“Supporters of Shariah”) as the militia manning the checkpoints around the compound that horrible night. Of course, Libya militias seem to be loose organizations with overlapping membership. More important, though, as John Rosenthal, author of “The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion,” puts it, virtually all of them “sympathize” with Ansar al-Sharia. “In fact,” Rosenthal said in a recent interview with me, “in the literal sense of the term, virtually all of the Eastern Libyan militias are ‘Ansar al-Sharia’ – that is to say ‘supporters of the Shariah.’”

Read more: Family Security Matters 

How Obama Betrayed America

betrayed_lgBelow is David Horowitz’s new pamphlet, How Obama Betrayed America…And No One is Holding Him Accountable. To order it, click here.

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America.  We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall.  We see farther into the future.” – Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Bill Clinton

It is a judgment on Barack Obama’s timorous, apologetic, irresponsible and ultimately anti-American conduct of foreign affairs that Madeleine Albright’s words, spoken little more than 15 years ago, now sound as antique as a pronouncement by Harry Truman at the onset of the Cold War, the great challenge America confronted bravely and without equivocation a generation ago.  While Obama has quoted this statement repeatedly to hide his real disdain for his country, he has set in motion policies meant to make America far from indispensable — a diminished nation that “leads from behind” if at all; a nation with a downsized military that is chronically uncertain about its meaning and its mission as it skulks in the wings of the world stage.

Albright’s statement was made about Iraq when Democrats were still supporting their country’s confrontation with its sadistic dictator Saddam Hussein, and before they defected from the war shortly after its battles were under way.  As a senator, in step with his Democratic colleagues, Obama opposed America’s war with Iraq while American troops were still in harms’ way, and then opposed the military surge that finally won the victory; as president he presided over the withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq,  against the wishes of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who wanted a continuing military presence, paid for with the blood of thousands of American men and women in arms. Obama thus turned that benighted nation over to the malign influences of America’s chief enemy in the Middle East, Iran, while betraying every American who gave his or her life for its freedom.

Far from shouldering his responsibility as the commander-in-chief of America’s global War on Terror and embracing it as this generation’s equivalent of the Cold War, Obama showed his distaste for the entire enterprise by dropping the term “War on Terror” and replacing it with an Orwellian phrase — “overseas contingency operations.” Minimizing the Islamist threat to the United States is not an oversight of the Obama administration; it is its policy.

It should not have been difficult for Obama to make the nation’s defense a priority when he became America’s commander-in-chief in January 2009.  The American homeland had already experienced a devastating attack, which terrorists have been constantly trying to repeat. The number of foreign states openly supporting terror has steadily increased (and grown even more during Obama’s tenure); and the most dangerous Islamist regime – Iran – is being allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, while Washington dithers over pointless negotiations. With secular governments giving way to Islamist regimes in Turkey, Egypt and Iraq, with the Taliban on the rise in Afghanistan and an American withdrawal imminent, the global situation today has eerie parallels to the early Cold War, with implications equally dire.  Yet instead of policies that put U.S. national security first and are pursued without hesitation or apology, Obama’s time in office has been marked by retreat and accommodation and even support of Islamist foes – most ominously of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which swept aside an American ally, with Obama’s personal intervention, and is busily creating a totalitarian state.

  Obama’s Foreign Policy Disasters

In the four years since Obama’s first inauguration, almost three times as many Americans have been killed in Afghanistan as in the eight years of the Bush administration. Withdrawal, not victory, has been Obama’s goal from the outset, and now it is the only outcome possible.  During the Obama years, there have been more than 8,000 Islamic terrorist attacks on “infidels” across the globe, a twenty-five percent rise over the years in which the fighting in Iraq was at its height. Yet, in the face of this bloody and intensifying Islamist offensive, Obama has tried to convince the American people that the war against al-Qaeda has been essentially “won” — by him — and the terrorist threat is subsiding.[1]  Denial of the war Islamists have declared on us and denial of the threat it represents is the heart of the Obama doctrine that has guided this nation’s policies for more than four years.

Obama’s desire for rapprochement with Iran’s Islamist regime has prompted the administration to drag its feet on the sanctions designed to halt Iran’s nuclear program. For the same reason, the president and his administration were silent when hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets of Teheran to call for an end to the dictatorship and were met by an orgy of violence from the mullahs’ thugs.  Because of the White House’s moral and political timidity, borne out of its denial of the Islamist threat and the guilty conviction that America (presumably an even greater predator) has no right to condemn another nation, this tipping point in Iran tipped the wrong way.

The administration’s denial was also egregiously manifest in its response to the massacre of 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood by an Islamic fanatic, who three and a half years later still has not been brought to trial. The Fort Hood terrorist successfully infiltrated the American military and despite open expressions of hatred against the West was promoted to U.S. Army Major. The Obama administration’s Kafkaesque response to an obvious case of Islamist violence against the U.S. was to classify the terrorist attack as an incident of “workplace violence,” and thus to hide the fact that Hasan was a Muslim soldier in a war against the infidels of the West.

This inability to name our enemies was on display again on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11 when  jihadists staged demonstrations and launched attacks against the American embassies in Egypt and other Islamic countries. In Libya, al-Qaeda terrorists overran an American consular compound and murdered the American ambassador and three brave staffers. The attack took place in a country that had recently been destabilized by Obama’s own intervention to oust its dictator. As senator, Obama had denounced a military intervention in Iraq, which, unlike his Libyan adventure, had been authorized by both houses of Congress and a unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution. As president, he had invoked the principle of non-intervention to justify his passivity in the face of governmental atrocities in Syria and Iran. But in Libya he conducted an unauthorized invasion of a country that posed no threat to the United States and was not, as Syria is, in alliance with the mullahs of Iran and the terrorists of Hizbollah. The chaos that followed Obama’s Libyan intervention led directly to the rise of the local al-Qaeda, which planted its flag atop the same American outpost in Benghazi it later destroyed, and the U.S. ambassador along with it.

The events in Benghazi were a stark revelation of the consequences of a foreign policy without a moral compass.  The battle over the embassy lasted seven hours. Although the President learned about the attack shortly after it began and although the embattled Americans inside the compound begged the White House for help, and although U.S. fighter jets were stationed in Italy only an hour away, the president, in one of the most shameful acts in the history of that office, denied help by leaving his post, so that only silence answered their desperate calls. The president and his administration then went into cover-up mode lying to Congress and the American people, pretending for weeks afterwards that the attack was the result of a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Mohammed internet video, whose director they then threw in jail.

Before his overthrow, the dictator, Moammar Gaddafi, warned that his demise would unleash the forces of the Islamic jihad not only in his own country but throughout North Africa. This was a prophecy quickly realized. In the aftermath of Obama’s intervention, al-Qaeda was able to take control in Mali of an area twice the size of Germany. In Tunisia and Egypt, jihadists emerged as the ruling parties, with the acquiescence and even assistance of the Obama administration. In Syria, a savage civil war metastasized unimpeded, killing tens of thousands and eventually pitting a fascist regime allied to Iran against rebel forces largely aligned with al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

As these disasters unfolded, the White House not only did not oppose the Islamists but armed and enabled them. Obama had previously intervened in Egypt, the largest and most important country in the Middle East, to force the removal of its pro-American leader, Hosni Mubarak. He then promoted the Brotherhood’s ascension to power by portraying it as a “moderate” actor in the democratic process. As the Middle East situation deteriorated, the Muslim Brotherhood became the chief beneficiary of America’s financial, diplomatic and military support. This same Brotherhood was the driving force behind the Islamist surge, the mentor of Osama bin Laden and the leaders of al-Qaeda, and the creator of Hamas. Rather than being quarantined, the Brotherhood-dominated government in Cairo now received hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid and F-16 bomber jets from the Obama administration that had facilitated its rise to power.

Appeasement of Islamist Enemies

To allay concerns about the emergence of the Brotherhood, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued the following justification for its acceptance by the White House: “We believe that it is in the interests of the United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful, and committed to non-violence, that intend to compete for the parliament and the presidency.”[2] In these words, Clinton was referring to an organization whose spiritual leader, Yusef al-Qaradawi, had recently called for a second Holocaust of the Jews, “Allah willing, at the hands of the believers,” and a party that was calling for the establishment of a Muslim caliphate in Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish state.[3] Soon after Clinton’s endorsement, the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, Mohamed Morsi, was elected Egypt’s new leader and was referring to Jews as apes and pigs. Secure in the American administration’s support, he wasted no time in abolishing the constitution and instituting a dictatorship with no serious protest from the United States. Only months before this destruction of Egypt’s civic space by his Islamist party, the new dictator was visited by then Senator John Kerry, shortly to be Hillary Clinton’s successor as Secretary of State. Kerry assured the world that the new Muslim Brotherhood regime was “committed to protecting fundamental freedoms.”[4]

Read the rest at Front Page

U.S., Allies Creating Ascendency of Islamist Radicals in Syria

SyriaFreeArmyFightersBigThe Clarion Project:

The U.S. and its allies have directly created the problem of Islamist radicals running the insurgency in Syria by providing support to them, all the while saying that they were simply supporting a domestic democratic uprising that reluctantly turned violent only after the regime turned to force.

In its report, the New York Times summed up the situation in Syria by saying, “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.”

The report went on to explain that most of the so-called rebels, or freedom fighters, seeking to overthrow the brutal but secular Assad regime are all radical Islamists. These are the same rebels to whom the US is giving hundreds of millions of dollars in nonmilitary aid.

Senator John McCain said that the problem caused by U.S. interventionism on behalf of the Islamist insurgents in Syria is all the fault of the non-interventionists. “Everything that the non-interventionists said would happen in Syria if we intervened has happened. The jihadists are on the ascendency, there are chemical weapons being used and the massacres continue,” he said.

The lead group, al-Nusra Front, is considered a terrorist group by the U.S. and is directly affiliated with al-Qaeda, to whose leaders it has pledged loyalty. The rest are radical Islamists of various stripes who have pushed aside secular fighting forces. They have already seized the government’s oil fields. They are beginning to repress wary secular activists with Islamic courts. If they obtain control of the chemical weapons compound, there is no telling what horrors they could visit upon the Syrian people and beyond.

Another prominent group, Ahrar al-Sham, shares much of Al Nusra’s extremist ideology but is made up mostly of Syrians.

The two groups are most active in the north and east and are widely respected by other rebels for their fighting abilities and their ample arsenal, much of it given by sympathetic donors from the Gulf states.

Read more at The Clarion Project

 

Anatomy of a Coverup

Dereliction-of-Duty-Five

We now have whistle blowers set to testify that what happened in Benghazi is very different than what the Obama administration has told us. We also have the proof that the Benghazi talking points were scrubbed. The question being asked now is why did Hillary Clinton and so many top administration officials, including General Petraeus, go to such extraordinary lengths to present a false narrative?

Daniel Greenfield has written a very good explanation of the Obama administration’s foreign policy towards the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda in his piece, “Obama’s Big Brotherhood Bet” at Front Page that helps answer this question:

In the spring of 2009, Obama went down to Cairo. He skipped the gaming tables at the Omar Khayyam Casino at the Cairo Marriott and instead went over to the Islamist baccarat tables at Cairo University and bet big on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama had insisted on Muslim Brotherhood attendance at a speech that was part apology and part abandonment. The apology was for American power and the abandonment was of American allies.

The text of the speech was largely inconsequential in the same way that most of the words that scroll across the teleprompters of politicians are. In politics, the speech is often the medium while the timing, the audience and the location are the message. And the message was that the Brotherhood’s hour had come.

Obama was following through on an idea that had long been an article of faith on the left. The idea was that the United States had invested in a defunct status quo and that our biggest problems were our allies. The only way out was to toss them all overboard.

Generations of diplomats had griped from their walled compounds in Riyadh, Kuwait City or Doha that many of our problems in the region would go away if Israel somehow went away. But this was bigger. It involved dumping every single allied government in the region to start fresh with new governments elected through popular democracy and enjoying popular support. It would be a new beginning. And a new beginning was also the title of the Cairo speech.

The idea wasn’t new, but it was right up there with proposals to unilaterally abandon our nuclear arsenal or dedicate ten percent of the budget to foreign aid; ideas that a lot of diplomats liked, but that they knew no one would ever be crazy enough to pull the trigger on.

And then Obama tried to pull the trigger on two out of three. What he wanted was for the Brotherhood to win so that it could make the War on Terror irrelevant.

As much as the advocates of smart and soft power insisted that Islamic terrorism had nothing to do with Islam, they knew better. They knew that Al Qaeda wanted to create Islamic states that would form into a Caliphate. Central to its thinking was that it would have to fight to create these states. But what if the Caliphate could be created without a war?

To make it happen, all America had to do was surrender the Middle East.

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The Obama administration, with it’s cultural relativist world view, believes that BOTH Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda can be moderated by making a  transition to democracy with our help. There has been an Orwellian re-branding of the word terrorism in order to sell this idea to the public as well as a denial of the so called al Qaeda “franchise’s” ideological links to “core” al Qaeda. So when the al Qaeda militia we were partnering with (Feb. 17th Martyrs Brigade) to protect the embassy actually assisted al Qaeda members from Yemen and possibly Egypt to attack and kill our people in Benghazi, they had to cover that up or risk Obama losing the election. Hillary Clinton went to extraordinary measures to change the Benghazi talking points in order to protect her political future as well as Obama’s. As a bonus, she managed to insert the lie of the “offensive” video tape in order to advance the campaign to criminalize criticism of Islam.

Walid Phares: ” These forces were not on the map as a threat to US national security because of a political determination that they were on the right side of history, and they were perceived as in transition to integration.”

Clare Lopez: “The real issue — which is what the CIA, the State Department or anyone in the U.S. government has been doing backing regime change operations across the Middle East and North Africa region in the company of and for the benefit of Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood jihadis — never gets addressed, much less explained by the ARB or anyone else.”

The Human Cost of Jihad Denial

usa-boston_bombing-AP-photo-620x385By :

Wednesday brought new confirmation of the increasingly obvious fact that the U.S. intelligence apparatus in the age of Barack Obama is woefully unprepared to deal with the foremost threat to the safety of Americans today: Islamic jihad terrorism.

Nor is this lack of preparedness due to a lack of funding (Lord knows there is plenty of that for anything Obama wants to do) or other resources. There are many people who are deeply knowledgeable in the ideology and belief system that inspires Islamic jihad terror, and they are ready and willing to share their knowledge with intelligence officials – indeed, many of them did so during the Bush Administration and the early years of the Obama Administration, before his 2011 purge the counter-terror training materials of the truth about Islam and jihad.

That purge came after hard-Left journalistic propagandist Spencer Ackerman wrote a series of “exposes” that supposedly exposed “Islamophobia” in government counterterror training — that is, truthful information about Islam and jihad. See here and here for details. Then Farhana Khera, Executive Director of an Islamic organization called Muslim Advocates, wrote a letter on October 19, 2011 to Barack Obama’s then-Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and current CIA director John Brennan. The letter was signed by 57 organizations, including many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); Islamic Relief USA; the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); the Muslim American Society (MAS); and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

The letter demanded that Obama officials “purge all federal government training materials of biased materials” – that is, materials that they claimed were biased against Islam – and “implement a mandatory re-training program for FBI agents, U.S. Army officers, and all federal, state and local law enforcement who have been subjected to biased training.”

The Obama Administration immediately complied. Dwight C. Holton, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, emphasized that same day that training materials for the FBI would be purged of everything that Islamic supremacists deemed offensive: “I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for. They will not be tolerated.”

Read more at Front Page

A call to courage over Benghazi

-1156172513Center For Security Policy:

By Adm. James “Ace” Lyons (Ret.)

Five committees of the House of Representatives recently issued an interim report on the Benghazi tragedy, which clearly indicated that the highest levels of the State Department were involved in not only denying security resources but reducing them at our facilities in Libya, including the Benghazi Special Mission Compound. These were not “routine” security requests, as some have claimed. They were made by the Regional Security Office and also by Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens as well.

Why these legitimate requests were turned down remains an open question. There remains many other unanswered questions that were not addressed by the Accountability Review Board. For example, we still do not know what business was being conducted at the compound. Also, why was it necessary for Stevens to be in Benghazi with its out-of-control security situation on what should have been a high-security-alert day of Sept. 11? Why did the administration continue to lie to the American public for the better part of two weeks that it was a video that caused the attack when they knew it was a terrorist attack from Day One?

The American public — and certainly the families of the four Americans killed — need to know who gave the “stand-down order” and on whose authority. Former CIA Director David H. Petraeus has stated that no such order came from the CIA.

The lack of a military response remains another important unanswered question. Even though our military resources, particularly those of the U.S. Sixth Fleet have been drawn down to the point at which they’re essentially nonexistent, there were in-theater resources that could have responded and, most likely, would have saved America lives. These included F-16 fighter aircraft from Aviano, Italy, which could have been over the compound in about 90 minutes. There was also a 130-man Marine Force Recon Team at Sigonella, Italy, which could have been deployed to arrive at the compound in a matter of a few hours.

These resources would have made a difference, particularly since the attack went on for more than eight hours with no fear of interference or retaliation. Further, no one has yet been able to interview the 30-odd survivors about what actually happened during the attack. Why not?

Why has there been no effort to retaliate against the al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Shariah, which carried out the attack? Their leaders today sit in outdoor cafes in Benghazi sipping tea.

Our U.S. Sixth Fleet military posture in the Mediterranean is a disgrace. Since World War II up until 2008, we maintained the dominant military force in the Mediterranean, consisting of at least one carrier battle group and an amphibious Ready Group with an embarked Marine battalion, along with logistic support ships and other units. Today, we have one unarmed command ship — my old flagship — the USS Mt. Whitney (LCC-20). This is symptomatic of President Obama’s relentless effort to disarm our military, which is clearly affecting our national security.

Compounding the disarming of our military forces is Mr. Obama’s destabilizing social engineering. The latest example is a directive promulgated by the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff that all flag and general officers will now be evaluated by the subordinates under their commands. Does this make any sense? Is this to make sure that our military leadership is complying with the president’s “diversity” agenda? Will any member of the Joint Chiefs find the courage to stand up and voice objection?

This politically correct directive by the chairman defies all leadership logic. It will destroy unit integrity and morale. It will destroy the fundamental principles of the chain of command concept, which has served this nation honorably for more than 238 years. The integrity of command is not obtained by running a popularity contest. Currying favors with subordinates is alien to military leadership. This nonsense must be stopped.

Our nonresponse to the attack on our Benghazi facilities is in part reflective of our military leadership’s politically correct mentality as well as the administration’s policies to disarm our military forces. The first action that needs to be taken is to get the facts out to the American public on the Benghazi cover-up. Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, has sponsored a resolution (H. Res. 36) to establish a select committee to investigate and respond on the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. He has been joined by 122 members, at the latest count. The problem has been that House Speaker John A. Boehner has been stonewalling the establishment of such a committee, using the lame excuse that it will cost money and take a lot of time. Nonsense. The systematic causes that brought about the Benghazi debacle need to be unearthed now, as it will affect our national security in the future.

If the president were a Republican and Nancy Pelosi were the speaker, there would have been no hesitation on her part to find the courage to form such a committee. Hopefully, Mr. Boehner can find his.