Tag Archives: Benghazi

What the Obama Scandals Reveal About Progressive Ideology

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gty_barack_obama_irs_mad_speech_thg_130515_wblogBy Bruce Thornton:

The three scandals dominating the news this week all reveal the moral and intellectual corruption at the heart of progressive ideology. Whether are not these revelations gain enough traction to halt the country’s downward spiral is the more important question.

Benghazi

The moment it came into office the Obama administration bought into the delusional narrative that Islamic jihadist terror is a response to Western historical crimes against Muslims, rather than an expression of Islamic theology. The Israeli “occupation” of Palestine, the depredations of colonialism and imperialism, the resulting dysfunctional economies and oppressive governments in Muslim countries, the arrogant xenophobia and intolerance of American culture, the invasions of Muslim countries after 9/11––all were identified as the “root causes” of terrorism.

Obama’s foreign policy, based on the assumptions of American guilt and the malign consequences of George Bush’s arrogant, unilateralist foreign policy, thus was an attempt to correct the bad policies and behaviors that instigated terror. Thus Obama apologized in his Cairo speech, eagerly extended a diplomatic “hand” to the genocidal mullahs in Iraq, rushed for the exits in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported the dubious “Arab Spring” uprisings and their Islamist prime movers like the Muslim Brothers, and distanced America from Israel.

The intervention in Libya seemed to be an easy way to validate these beliefs, at the same time avoiding the charge of retreat and withdrawal from America’s global responsibilities to advance human rights and protect the victims of tyranny. The overthrow of Gaddafi was sanctioned by the U.N. and engineered by NATO, thus confirming the progressive belief that unilaterally pursuing national interests was, like nationalism itself, immoral, and that only transnational collective action sanctioned by international institutions was legitimate.

For a while the optics were good. A creepy psychopath was eliminated, no casualties were suffered, and a seemingly secular democracy was aborning. The idealism of democracy promotion, one bungled by the unilateral, trigger-happy George Bush, was indulged at little political cost, while the “legitimate” war, against al Qaeda, was being pursued just as cheaply with out-of-sight, out-of-mind drone killings, proving that Obama was no crypto-pacifist squish. Hence the foreign policy narrative peddled during the presidential campaign that al Qaeda was on the ropes and democracy was on the march.

The attack on Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, eight weeks before the election, exploded that narrative. Al Qaeda and its affiliates were not on the ropes, but were growing and expanding, and could swiftly organize the sack of an embassy office and the murder of four Americans, including an ambassador, humiliating the infidel superpower. Libya was not a democracy-in-the-making, but a Darwinian tribal and sectarian jungle dominated by jihadists armed with the weapons we put in their hands when we destroyed the Gaddafi regime. The refusal to beef up security in Benghazi, which would have been an admission that things weren’t so rosy in the fledgling democracy, now looked like a political calculation that cost American lives. Worse yet, once more the idea that terrorism is a response to our bad behavior was exploded, as many of those Libyans we had liberated turned against us, just as thousands of Afghans and Iraqis have.

So of course the attack had to be spun into something closer to Obama’s foreign policy narrative: the attack was caused by a “spontaneous” protest against an Internet video insulting Mohammed. The administration knew this was a lie the day of the attack, but could not admit this repudiation of Obama’s foreign policy claims so close to the election, and so kept repeating the lie for two weeks, trusting the media spaniels to spin the attack and collude in the still on-going cover-up.

IRS Political Harassment

The IRS’s targeting of groups associated with conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt status is a predictable consequence of the progressive narrative that conservatism is a form of neurosis, the lashing out of ignorant, violent “bitter clingers” against a changing world that challenges their racial privilege, economic power, and religious superstitions. The fondness of groups like the Tea Party for the Bill of Rights and the Constitution reflects this psychopathology, the desire to “turn back the clock” and restore their once exalted social and political position. As such, they are dangerous––and armed to boot––and so require monitoring by all right-thinking people who are progressing towards the utopia of “social justice.”

So it’s no surprise that IRS functionaries would create investigative rubrics like “Tea Party” or “patriot” that reflect these assumptions in order to guide them in their scrutiny of groups seeking tax-exempt status. These bureaucrats have absorbed the narrative from the mainstream media and popular culture, both of which are steeped in the two-bit pop psychologizing that passes for wisdom among those who fancy themselves the enlightened “anointed,” as Thomas Sowell calls them. Nor are they troubled at using the coercive power of the state to pursue these political agendas, for one of the most important progressive principles is that righteous ends can justify a whole range of brutal means.

Whether or not someone in the Obama administration directly ordered the IRS to pursue this partisan harassment is irrelevant. Like the Corleone family, the administration has a lot of “buffers.” No one had to be told, just as the progressives don’t have to tell anyone in Hollywood to make yet another movie or television show denigrating and demonizing corporations, conservatives, Christians, or the CIA. That is what’s so insidious about this ideology: it has permeated the minds of people to the point that unsavory actions advancing the cause are never questioned or doubted. In the progressive mind, dogma rules, not principle. Hence the righteous act to advance ideologically sanctioned political ends without bothering about coherent or consistent principle.

Read more at Front Page

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Obama and the “Official Truth”

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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

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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.

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

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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 

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Obama: No Shame, No Honor

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Dereliction-of-Duty-Fiveby Justin O Smith:

The statements coming out of the Congressional Oversight Committee’s investigation into the events surrounding the attacks on the consulate and the CIA Annex at Benghazi on 9/11/2012 paint a picture of the Obama administration, Obama, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta and the “Yes men” of the Accountability Review Board, that illustrates they are more concerned with advancing the agenda of the Progressive Democratic Party than protecting American citizens. Their own words have shown them unwilling to take responsibility for their own failures regarding their duties in each of their respective positions, as they are also exposed as self-serving liars, incompetents and cowards!

On May 12, 2012, Senator Feinstein (D-CA) told David Gregory on Meet the Press that she “saw no malevolence” in the actions of the Obama administration during or after Benghazi. It certainly wasn’t good will that had Obama go to bed without a care in the world and get up the next morning, as if nothing had happened, and go campaign in Nevada. It wasn’t good will that kept Obama, Clinton and Panetta from immediately sending a Special Forces or Quick Response team to rescue survivors, and it wasn’t good will that created twelve different revisions of the CIA’s original Intelligence Report that left no doubt the attack on Benghazi was a terror attack and had nothing to do with an anti-Islamic video or a spontaneous protest!

Whose brainchild was the cover story of the anti-Islamic video? Who gave the order for the Special Forces team in Tripoli to stand down? We do need the answers to these questions and more, but in the end, all culpability and responsibilty for the lies and the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glenn Dogherty rests squarely with Obama and Clinton, along with Panetta and General David Patraeus who toed the line and joined the lie.

Obama and Clinton knew almost immediately that the U.S. “diplomatic facility” (whatever the administration is calling it today) was under a terrorist attack, because Gregory Hicks, the Deputy Chief of Missions and assistant to Ambassador Stevens spoke with Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State and his boss, at 2:00am the night of the attack, and he briefed her on the events on the ground. Clinton and Obama have been lying through their teeth the entire time, which explains the reason they have persistently stone-walled the Oversight Committee and obstructed the investigation into Benghazi.

Most Americans knew right away something was wrong with the Obama administration’s account of the attack on Benghazi. Many of us heard foreign news services such as ‘The Independent’ from the U.K. detailing the attack as a terrorist attack; and, one would have thought that the account given by the Libyan President, which clearly stated Ansar al-Sharia was the perpetrator, would have precluded UN Ambassador Susan Rice from advancing Obama’s and Clinton’s lie.

“I was stunned. My jaw dropped, and I was embarrassed,” stated Greg Hicks, when asked about his reaction to Susan Rice’s explanation for the Benghazi attacks.

The State Department and spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, in particular, pushed for the removal of all references in the CIA Intelligence Report to Al Qaeda, previous warnings about potential terrorist attacks and Ansar al-Sharia. After meeting with the White House and intelligence agencies, they were worried that the information could be “abused” by members of Congress “to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings”… which was the truth…, as Nuland elaborated, “so why would we want to feed that either?”

Nuland just described the inception of a conspiracy, and one in which then CIA Director David Patraeus enjoined by saying what the administration wanted to hear, and Ambassador Pickering enjoined with a substandard ARB Report that was sorely lacking; Greg Hicks was not allowed to review classified ARB documents, and several individuals with first hand knowledge of the Benghazi attack were never questioned by the ARB, although they were pressing to give their accounts and testimony.

On May 8, 2012, Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC) asked,  “Isn’t it true that just hours after the attack, the Libyan President called it a terrorist attack?” Hicks replied, “Yes.” Then Gowdy focused on Ambassador Stevens’ last words to Hicks…”we’re under attack!” Gowdy asked, “If a protest was ongoing during some part of the day, wouldn’t a professional career diplomat mention it?” Hicks answered, “Yes.” Gowdy: “Did Ambassador Stevens mention such a protest?” Hicks: “No.”

Between January and April 2013, some of the typical responses from the Obama administration have ranged from press secretary Jay Carney’s “Benghazi was a long time ago” to John Kerry’s (new Sec of State) “We have more importan things to get on to” and Clinton’s “What difference does it make.” All of these statements show just what little regard they have for the sacrifice made by those four Americans and their deaths in general.

Elija Cummings (D-MD), in condescending fashion, relegated the deaths in Benghazi to insignificance by stating, “death is a part of life.” This is a gross insult. However much death is a part of life, we do not require such an explanation, nor does it mean that we want to rush to greet Death or to be refused help to escape Death, especially when the help we ask for is standing nearby… willing and able!

The officals at Benghazi and Tripoli were desperate for a rescue mission, but as Lt Colonel Gibson’s Special Forces team prepared to answer the call, they were told to “stand down.” And during this same time frame, Gregory Hicks was having an intense conversation with a furious Mark Thompson, as Thompson and his four man Foreign Emergency Support team were being blocked from responding by their so-called “superiors”!… It’s also unfathomable that a fighter jet could not be scrambled “in less than 22 hours”, as the administration alleges!

Secretary of Defense Panetta essentially said, “There’s bullets flying around over there. I’m not going to put my guys in there.” Why do we even have a military or a Special Forces then, if not to walk in harm’s way when American’s come under attack and an imminent threat of death? Panetta, Clinton and Obama took the coward’s way out. “A brave man dies but once…a coward dies a thousand deaths,” except when a man such as Obama is full of hubris and has no sense of shame or honor.

The party agenda is the most important item for today’s Progressive Democrats, even more than America’s national security or American lives, and this is, in large part, the reason that Obama and Hillary Clinton fabricated the anti-Islamic video story, as part of a cover up and a conspiracy to hide the fact that the attack on the U.S. Consulate at Benghazi was in fact a terror attack initiated by Al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Sharia. Only days before the Benghazi attacks, Obama had stated that Al Qaeda was on the run and decimated and “Osama’s dead”, so he made a conscious decision to present this lie about an anti-Islamic video; he delivered the lie convincingly and with emotion any actor would envy, as a ploy to prevent any new wrinkles from undermining his presidential campaign and to avoid acknowledging that Islam and the world-wide Muslim community hated his administration, just as much as they had hated President Bush’s administration. But when Obama and Clinton had clear signs and career professionals saying that they needed more security, and Obama and Clinton ignored them out of a misplaced need to make Libya appear to be “normalized”, that in and of itself is criminal when it results in the deaths of four fine Americans… cut down in their prime!

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Report: Jihadist Group Hired to Defend U.S. Benghazi Mission

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The Clarion Project:

In an “exclusive” story, a Newsmax.com reporting on Fox News has uncovered that the Libyan militia group that was hired by the State Department to defend its embattled diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, were clearly al-Qaeda sympathizers, and had even prominently displayed the al-Qaeda flag on a Facebook page for months before the deadly attack.

Newsmax.com reports that, “A document recovered from the mission two days after the attack indicated the State Department had arranged for the Martyrs Brigade to act as a “Quick Reaction Force” to protect the mission. The Memorandum of Agreement states that ‘in the event of an attack on the U.S. mission, QRF will request additional support from the 17th February Martyrs Brigade.’ ”

Noteworthy is the fact that on October 30, more than six months ago,The Clarion Project’s Clare Lopez reported:

“In August 2012, Stevens reported that the security situation in Benghazi was deteriorating, yet in spite of this, the 16-man Site Security Team assigned to Libya, comprised of Special Forces led by SF LTC Andy Wood, was ordered out of Libya, contrary to the Ambassador’s stated desire that they stay.

“Note that, at any time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could have ordered the deployment to Benghazi of additional security experts from the Department of Security (DoS) Bureau of Diplomatic Security (or Diplomatic Security Service—DSS), but apparently chose not to do so.

“Instead, DoS hired a British firm, Blue Mountain, to manage its security in Benghazi, and Blue Mountain subcontracted the job to a local jihadist militia called the February 17 Martyrs Brigade who have known Muslim Brotherhood ties.

“Furthermore, Nordstrom testified at the October 11, 2012 Congressional hearings that ‘in deference to sensitivity to Libyan practice, the guards at Benghazi were unarmed’– an inexplicable practice for a place as dangerous as Benghazi.”

The Martyrs Brigade, financed by the Libyan defense ministry, is considered the largest and best armed militia in eastern Libya. It consists of at least 12 battalions and possesses a large collection of light and heavy weapons in addition to training facilities. Its membership is estimated at between 1,500 and 3,500.

The group has carried out various security and law and order tasks in eastern Libya and Kufra in the south. Some of its members are also believed to be fighting the Assad regime in Syria.  They fly the al-Qaeda flag on their Facebook page, and have long been al-Qaeda sympathizers.

The Brigade was paid by the U.S. government to provide security at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. There is no evidence that the Martyrs Brigade fulfilled its commitment to defend the mission on Sept. 11, when it came under attack.

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The Women of Benghazigate

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By Frank Gaffney:

Suddenly, it seems we have broken through the most effective executive branch cover-up and complicit media blackout in memory.  Among the many recent revelations is one that has gone unnoted:  The prominent role played by women in the Obama administration’s: policy-making that led up to the jihadist attack in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012; its handling of the crisis; and its subsequent, scandalous damage-control operation.

Since, as they say, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, here’s a short guide to the Women of Benghazigate, whose contributions to one aspect or another of this affair have become public knowledge – thanks, in particular, to testimony from three whistleblowers before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week:

  • First, there is Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time. We now know she was personally responsible for at least some of the decisions that left personnel in the “special mission compound” in Benghazi highly vulnerable to attack.  Her whereabouts and activities are unaccounted for – like those of President Obama – during most of the seven-plus hours in which jihadists systematically assaulted first that facility and then a nearby CIA “annex.”  And then, the next day, she knowingly deceived the public about what precipitated the attack, blaming an internet video.
  • The poster child for the Benghazigate cover-up is UN Ambassador Susan Rice.  She was chosen to make the rounds of all five network Sunday morning news programs on September 16, 2012.  She reinforced the false narrative that Mrs. Clinton first pushed out publicly four days before in a joint Rose Garden appearance with President Obama.
  • State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland was evidently among those involved in massaging twelve different versions of “talking points” upon which intelligence officials drew to misleadingly brief the Congress.  Amb. Rice also used such guidance to justify the fraud that YouTube, not jihad, was responsible for the violence in Benghazi.
  • Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, was formerly in charge of managing so-called “bimbo eruptions” during Bill Clinton’s 1992 run for the White House and administration.  According to one of last week’s witnesses, Gregory Hicks – who became the Chief of Mission in Libya after his boss, Ambassador Chris Stevens, was murdered on that fateful night, Ms. Mills has lately been suppressing equally unwanted eruptions concerning Benghazigate.  She upbraided the diplomat for challenging the party line about what happened then and thereafter.  She also reportedly sought to interfere with a congressional investigation into the matter.
  •  Mr. Hicks testified that the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, Beth Jones, delivered her own, “blistering critique” of his management style after he asked “why the ambassador said there was a demonstration when the embassy reported there was an attack?”  Mr. Hicks believes he was demoted in retaliation for posing such unwelcome questions.

Curiously, the truth that has finally begun to emerge has yet to shed light on the involvement of two other women who almost certainly were players before, during and after the Benghazi attacks.

The first is Valerie Jarrett.  She is President Obama’s longtime consigliere.  Such is her relationship with him and the First Lady that she is permitted to involve herself in virtually all portfolios, including the most sensitive foreign affairs and national security ones.

That would surely be the case in this instance in light of Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan’s insightful observation:

“The Obama White House sees every event as a political event….Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions. And the American presidential election was only eight weeks away. They wanted this problem to go away, or at least to bleed the meaning from it.”

To paraphrase Senator Howard Baker’s famous questions from an earlier congressional investigation of a presidential cover-up called Watergate: What did Ms. Jarrett do, and when did she do it?

Then, there’s Mrs. Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin.  It strains credulity that Ms. Abedin would not be involved in this crisis, given the important role she has played in Mrs. Clinton’s world for over twelve years. As the Washington Post observed in 2007 – long before Hillary became America’s top diplomat: “Abedin…is one of Clinton’s most-trusted advisers on the Middle East….When Clinton hosts meetings on the region, Abedin’s advice is always sought.”

What was Huma Abedin’s advice when her boss responded to the proverbial “3 o’clock call” on the evening of September 11, 2012?  For that matter, in light of Huma’s longstanding and well-documented ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, we need to know what advice Ms. Abedin had been giving the Secretary of State about helping the Brotherhood and its fellow Islamists topple relatively friendly regimes throughout the Mideast and North Africa, including Muammar Qaddafi’s in Libya.

Of course, there are plenty of men implicated in the run-up to, events of and efforts to conceal the Benghazi scandal, starting with the President himself.  Their contributions to this debacle require thorough investigation.  But so do those of the Women of Benghazigate, including those peculiarly unimplicated to date: Valerie Jarrett and Huma Abedin.

C-SPAN Video: Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News asks tough questions on Benghazi

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Sharyl Attkinson

Watch —>C-SPAN Video: CBS News Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson discusses the investigation into last year’s attack at the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya in the wake of a hearing before the Oversight & Government Reform Committee on Wednesday.

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The Benghazi Lie

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pic_giant_051013_The-Benghazi-Lie

The government dispatched more firepower to arrest Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in Los Angeles than it did to protect its mission in Benghazi. It was such a great act of misdirection Hillary should have worn spangled tights and sawn Stevens’s casket in half.

By Mark Steyn:

Shortly before last November’s election I took part in a Fox News documentary on Benghazi, whose other participants included the former governor of New Hampshire John Sununu. Making chit-chat while the camera crew were setting up, Governor Sununu said to me that in his view Benghazi mattered because it was “a question of character.” That’s correct. On a question of foreign policy or counterterrorism strategy, men of good faith can make the wrong decisions. But a failure of character corrodes the integrity of the state.

That’s why career diplomat Gregory Hicks’s testimony was so damning — not so much for the new facts as for what those facts revealed about the leaders of this republic. In this space in January, I noted that Hillary Clinton had denied ever seeing Ambassador Stevens’s warnings about deteriorating security in Libya on the grounds that “1.43 million cables come to my office” — and she can’t be expected to see all of them, or any. Once Ambassador Stevens was in his flag-draped coffin listening to her eulogy for him at Andrews Air Force Base, he was her bestest friend in the world — it was all “Chris this” and “Chris that,” as if they’d known each other since third grade. But up till that point he was just one of 1.43 million close personal friends of Hillary trying in vain to get her ear.

Now we know that at 8 p.m. Eastern time on the last night of Stevens’s life, his deputy in Libya spoke to Secretary Clinton and informed her of the attack in Benghazi and the fact that the ambassador was now missing. An hour later, Gregory Hicks received a call from the then–Libyan prime minister, Abdurrahim el-Keib, informing him that Stevens was dead. Hicks immediately called Washington. It was 9 p.m. Eastern time, or 3 a.m. in Libya. Remember the Clinton presidential team’s most famous campaign ad? About how Hillary would be ready to take that 3 a.m.call? Four years later, the phone rings, and Secretary Clinton’s not there. She doesn’t call Hicks back that evening. Or the following day.

Are murdered ambassadors like those 1.43 million cables she doesn’t read? Just too many of them to keep track of? No. Only six had been killed in the history of the republic — seven, if you include Arnold Raphel, who perished in General Zia’s somewhat mysterious plane crash in Pakistan in 1988. Before that you have to go back to Adolph Dubs, who died during a kidnapping attempt in Kabul in 1979. So we have here a once-in-a-third-of-a-century event. And at 3 a.m. Libyan time on September 12 it’s still unfolding, with its outcome unclear. Hicks is now America’s head man in the country, and the cabinet secretary to whom he reports says, “Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you before the end of the week.” Just to underline the difference here: Libya’s head of government calls Hicks, but nobody who matters in his own government can be bothered to.

What was Secretary Clinton doing that was more important? What was the president doing? Aside, that is, from resting up for his big Vegas campaign event. A real government would be scrambling furiously to see what it could do to rescue its people. It’s easy, afterwards, to say that nothing would have made any difference. But, at the time Deputy Chief Hicks was calling 9-1-1 and getting executive-branch voicemail, nobody in Washington knew how long it would last. A terrorist attack isn’t like a soccer game, over in 90 minutes. If it is a sport, it’s more like a tennis match: Whether it’s all over in three sets or goes to five depends on how hard the other guy pushes back. The government of the United States took the extremely strange decision to lose in straight sets. Not only did they not deploy out-of-area assets, they ordered even those in Libya to stand down. Lieutenant Colonel Gibson had a small team in Tripoli that twice readied to go to Benghazi to assist and twice was denied authority to do so, the latter when they were already at the airport. There weren’t many of them, not compared to the estimated 150 men assailing the compound. But they were special forces, not bozo jihadists. Back in Benghazi, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty held off numerically superior forces for hours before dying on a rooftop waiting for back-up from a government that had switched the answering machine on and gone to Vegas.

Read more at National Review

 

Why Benghazi Is Overwhelmingly Important

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gravestone-what-diff-does-it-makeBy Barry Rubin:

There is something terribly and tragically and importantly symbolic about the Benghazi attack that may be lost in the tidal wave of details about what happened on September 11, 2012, in an incident where four American officials were murdered in a terrorist attack. This point stands at the heart of everything that has happened in American society and intellectual life during the last decade.

And that point is this:

America was attacked once again on September 11, attacked by al-Qaeda in an attempt to destroy the United States — as ridiculous as that goal might seem. Yet: the U.S. government blamed the attack on America itself.

Other reasons can be adduced for the official position that what happened that day was due to a video insulting Islam rather than a terrorist attack, but this is the factor of overwhelming importance. It transformed the situation in the following ways:

– Muslims were the victims of American misbehavior, a point emerging from the administration’s wider worldview of U.S. aggression and Third World suffering, as in the lectures of all those left-wing anti-American academics and the sermons of Jeremiah Wright.

– “Hate speech” and racism (as “Islamophobia” is often reconfigured) were the cause of troubles.

– While freedom of speech and such liberties should be defended, they must be limited in some ways to prevent further trouble.

– America’s proper posture should be one of apology, as in the advertisements that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made for the Pakistani and other media.

– The “misblaming,” to coin a word, of the video showed terrorist groups that not only can they attack Americans, but they can do so without fear of punishment … or even of blame! As the House of Representatives’ hearings show, the misattribution of responsibility also delayed the FBI’s investigation, perhaps conclusively so.

– The exercise of American power has been the cause of America’s problems, not an excess of appeasement. The chickens — in Wright’s phrase — are merely coming home to roost. Yet once the video was blamed — the video which few in the Middle East were aware of — there were in fact further anti-American riots in different countries, now over the video which Clinton and others made known, in which dozens of people died. This showed that appeasement and apology caused worse problems.

– The solution to these Middle East conflicts required a change in U.S. policies in order to avoid further offense. This meant distancing from Israel and even historic Arab allies, showing respect and encouragement even for “moderate” Islamist movements, and other measures.

In short, this is the stance of blaming America and exonerating its enemies that has seized hold of the national consciousness. Of course, parallel responses met the Boston bombing, as the mass media and academics scrambled to give alternative explanations to the terrorists’ motives.

The truth is, however, extremely simple: the United States faces a revolutionary Islamist movement that will neither go away nor moderate itself.

To understand this movement and its ideology, how it is and is not rooted in Islam, its weaknesses and divisions, the forces willing to help combat it, and the ways to devise strategies to battle it is the prime international need for the moment. It is as necessary to do these things for revolutionary Islamism today as it was to do the same things regarding Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s and for communism in the 1940s and 1950s.

Yet the U.S. armed forces and other institutions are forbidden from holding this inquiry.

Read more at PJ Media

See also:

Blaming America (gatestoneinstitute.org)