Tag Archives: Clinton

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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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

 

Clinton’s Republican Guard

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hillary4By Andrew McCarthy:

With each new revelation, what has always been obvious becomes more pronounced: the State Department’s self-proclaimed final word on the Benghazi Massacre, the risibly named “Accountability Review Board” investigation, is a fraud. Yet, like the rest of the Obama administration’s obstructive wagon-circling, the ARB’s report continues serving its intended purpose: to thwart efforts to hold administration officials accountable. Even on Fox News, which has been admirably dogged covering a scandal the Obamedia has done its best to bury, the refrain is heard: How could the ARB report be a whitewash when its investigation was run by such Washington eminences as Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Michael Mullen?

The answer is simple: Pickering and Mullen were not chosen by accident; then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tapped them because, to insulate herself, she needed a pair of Beltway careerists held in high esteem by the progressive-friendly Republican establishment. As night follows day, Pickering and Mullen produced exactly the shoddy, politicized report that was expected of them – bleaching away the malfeasance of Clinton, a central figure in the scandal whom they did not even bother to interview.

Mrs. Clinton is a master of this game.

Recall that her top advisor at State was Huma Abedin, a longtime associate of Omar Abdullah Naseef, a rabid Islamic supremacist and financial backer of al Qaeda. For a dozen years, during most of which she was also working for Mrs. Clinton, Abedin worked at Naseef’s Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs – a building block of the joint Saudi regime and Muslim Brotherhood project to promote sharia enclaves in the West, encouraging Muslims to resist assimilation.

Abedin had begun working for then-First Lady Hillary Clinton in the nineties, while a member of the executive board of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at George Washington University. Founded in the early sixties, the MSA is first building block of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure, and its GWU chapter has quite a history: In 2001, its “spriritual guide” was Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda operative who was then ministering to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers. As Patrick Poole hasdemonstrated, it was in the MSA that Awlaki first cut his Islamic supremacist teeth – as have a number of prominent Islamists, including (to name just two) Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood stalwart turned Egyptian president, and Abdurrahman Alamoudi, a now convicted al Qaeda financier who was a favorite “moderate” Muslim leader of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

Abedin continued at Naseef’s journal until moving to the State Department with Secretary Clinton in 2009. Naseef, a wealthy, well-connected Saudi, was Secretary General of the Muslim World League, perhaps the most significant Saudi-Brotherhood collaboration in the world. In addition to founding the journal, Naseef  also started the Rabita Trust, a formally designated international terrorist organization. His partner in that venture was Wael Jalaidan, a founding member of al Qaeda who –whaddya know! – ran the MSA chapter in Arizona. The Rabita Trust that was an important funding source for Osama bin Laden. Ms. Abedin’s close tie to Naseef stems from the fact that he is the patron of her parents – Muslim Brotherhood operatives both. Abedin’s mother, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin, is a close associate not only of Naseef but of top Muslim Brotherhood sharia jurist, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. In fact, Dr. Abedeen runs an organization, the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child, that is part of Qaradawi’s Union of Good. Formally designated as an international terrorist organization, the Union of Good is a major supporter of Hamas.

Five conservative Republican members of the House had the gumption to ask why a person with Ms. Abedin’s alarming connections to prominent Islamic supremacists would be given a high-echelon State Department job, performance of which requires a security clearance granting access to top-secret intelligence. Based on Abedin and other officials with disturbing Islamist ties, the five members asked for inspector-general investigations into Muslim Brotherhood penetration of our government.

In response, Secretary Clinton deftly called out the Washington establishment’s Republican guard. Senator John McCain, House Speaker John Boehner, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, and other top GOP figures obliged, dutifully lambasting the House conservatives. Nothing to see here – just “a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations,” twaddled McCain. Boehner, who conceded that he did “not know Huma” and had not read the House conservatives’ letters, nevertheless assured Americans that Abedin had a “sterling character” and that the accusations  “were pretty dangerous.”

Mind you, while all this was happening, Obama administration policy, led by the State Department, was swinging dramatically in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East. Obama was even intervening in Libya on behalf of the Brotherhood and al Qaeda elements in Benghazi, toppling a theretofore American-supported regime that had been providing us with critical intelligence against anti-American Islamists. Yet, Secretary Clinton succeeded in burying the story. Thanks to the GOP greybeards, the media meme became purported conservative Islamophobia. The bullet was dodged as the manifest influence of Islamic-supremacists on Obama administration policy was ignored.

Unlike that outrage, the public’s interest has been roused by the killings of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, State Department IT specialist Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Ty Woods and Glen Doherty on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, in virulently anti-American Benghazi – at a U.S. State Department compound of unexplained purpose which, under Clinton’s leadership, stood recklessly unprotected.

Read more at PJ Media

 

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Benghazigate Congressional Report: Obama Inc. Lied About Video, Hillary Knew About Inadequate Security

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hillary-2016-buttonBy :

The response of Obama Inc. and its defenders to the Benghazi attack has generally been some variation of, “Who could have known?”, “We didn’t know” and “How could we have known.”

Their claim that they practiced due diligence only to fall victim to an unexpected set of events never held much water. Benghazi was a danger zone and everyone knew it. The issue wasn’t a movie trailer, but the aftermath of a botched war that left Islamist militias in control of entire cities.

Now the Congressional report on Benghazigate tears apart some of the biggest claims.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

An ongoing Congressional investigation across five House Committees concerning the events surrounding the September 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya has made several determinations to date, including:

• Reductions of security levels prior to the attacks in Benghazi were approved at the highest levels of the State Department, up to and including Secretary Clinton. This fact contradicts her testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on January 23, 2013.

• In the days following the attacks, White House and senior State Department officials altered accurate talking points drafted by the Intelligence Community in order to protect the State Department.

• Contrary to Administration rhetoric, the talking points were not edited to protect classified information. Concern for classified information is never mentioned in email traffic among senior Administration officials.

This is, as noted, still preliminary but it finds enough deceptions to justify a more in depth investigation.

Read more at Front Page

 

Flag Draped Coffins

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article-2203298-1504F4CD000005DC-986_634x406by Justin O. Smith:

While I understand the current mission of the U.S. African Command to counter, stop and destroy Islamist militants and to fight terrorism without being drawn into a major conflict, the lack of preparation and the ignored warnings prior to the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. facilities at Benghazi are inexcusable and indefensible; repeatedly we have heard Obama and everyone associated with his administration declare that the U.S. response to these attacks was “adequate.” But more than this, as more facts are uncovered, no doubt is left that this administration is incompetent, and it is engaged in a cover-up of mammoth proportions.

Many Democrats call any criticism concerning the events surrounding the Benghazi slaughter “GOP political pandering,” but whatever your party affiliation, it is incomprehensible and beyond incompetence that Gen. Carter Ham did not request any additional forces to be on hand on the anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001, despite his belief that the intelligence did not indicate an imminent attack. Ham must have been struck deaf, dumb and blind, because nothing else explains such a casual dismissal of, at the very least, ten months of communiques and memos from the Benghazi Consulate that indicated a dire and increasingly dangerous situation looming on the horizon. And on that same note, one must wonder, as heads of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB), what bribe or coercion influenced retired Admiral Mike Mullen and retired Ambassador Thomas Pickering to find the Obama administration’s response to these attacks “adequate.”

I also wonder if Obama himself or Hillary Clinton have explained to the families of Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glenn Dogherty just how “adequate” the response really was? I’ll bet Tyrone Woods thought the response was “adequate” as he painted the terrorists’ mortar armed position with a laser and waited for it to be bombed by a drone or jet fighter from Aviano Airbase (Italy)… right up until he cursed Obama with his last dying gasp.

In conjunction with Glenn Dogherty’s Libyan mission to recover advanced weapons systems, such as SA-7 missiles from the hands of the Islamists, Ambassador Stevens was negotiating a weapons transfer and removal of SA-7s from the hands of Libyan extremists on the night of 9/11; FoxNews recently reported that the Libyan vessel ‘Al Entisar’ arrived in the Turkish port of Iskenderun, just 35 miles from the Syrian border, on September 6 with a cargo of RPGs, shoulder launched missiles and surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles. Add to this Stevens’ meeting with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin the night Stevens was murdered, and it is not far-fetched, rather highly likely, that the Obama administration has been running weapons through Turkey to the rebels in Syria, mostly comprised of Islamists and Al Qaeda and enemies of the U.S.

Although Clinton stated before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “I am determined to leave the State Dept and our country safer, stronger and more secure,” her determination on 9/11/12 was focused on joining in the spinning of the story, the obfuscation and outright lies originating with Obama. Clinton was actually notified of the attacks around 4PM and about an hour before Obama was notified by Leon Panetta. Apparently they sat on their thumbs and spun afterwards, despite Clinton’s claim that “we kept talking with everyone through the night.” But through a response garnered by Senator Lindsey Graham’s efforts in blocking Chuck Hagel’s nomination for Secretary of Defense, we know neither Clinton nor Obama attempted to contact government officials in Libya to help rescue our U.S. citizens that night, if time and logistics really were the problem; however, Obama did call Clinton at 10PM, and it was “about 10PM” when the State Dept released Clinton’s statement (FactCheck.org) entitled ‘Statement on the Attack in Benghazi’, which linked the attacks to an anti-Islamic video.

While the attacks were still ongoing, a lot of time was wasted simply doing nothing and fretting about political futures rather than saving American lives. When asked about Panetta’s and Gen. Dempsey’s Senate testimony that they weren’t in touch with the White House after their meeting ended at 5:30PM, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney stated, “They said they hadn’t spoken with the president. The president has a National Security Advisor… He has a Deputy National Security Advisor and remember he had already spoken with… the Secretary of Defense, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.” And with pin-point accuracy, Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) February 7th questioning of Panetta before the Armed Services Comittee exposes Carney’s lie: “Did you communicate with anyone else at the White House that night?” Panetta answered, “No.”

After Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc) placed Hillary Clinton on the spot regarding the fact that no protest existed prior to the attack, Clinton angrily retorted, “What difference… does it make?” The difference it makes is this, Mrs Clinton: Your outright lying and colloboration with Obama in this matter created a delay that cost Tyrone Woods and Glenn Dogherty their lives; no good reason can be given for not having ordered an airstrike on the terrorists’ position. And for fear of forced retirement and other curious reasons, some of the upper echelon military ranks have lost their spine, as they support the Democratic Party line, Obama’s position and the delusive findings of the ARB!

As I recall Obama and Clinton meeting flag-draped coffins of four brave Americans in feigned respect, I am ashamed of a people who could reelect such a thing to the Office of the President. A president should always strive for more than “adequate,” because to be merely adequate is meeting only a bare minimum of requirements; while Jay Carney quotes page 37 of the ARB report, “the safe evacuation of all U.S. government personnel from Benghazi twelve hours after the initial attack… was the result of exceptional… military response…,” an immense number of accomplished military minds such as Lt. Col. Tony Schaffer and Gen. William Boykin, ex-Commander of U.S. Special Forces, have refuted this analysis, which leaves dozens of unanswered questions: Why haven’t Americans heard from the surviving diplomatic security officer, who saw the attack begin and alerted the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli that they were under seige? … Why haven’t we heard the testimony of the thirty-two survivors, who Gen. C.K. Hyde confirms were evacuated to Ramstein Airbase (Germany)? … Why didn’t the Turkish Consul General warn Ambassador Stevens about the Al Qaeda checkpoints after he left at 8:35 PM Benghazi time? It doesn’t matter that protocol and standard operating procedures were followed and the response was “adequate.” What ever happened to initiative and rising above and beyond the call of duty? No doubt remains that Tyrone Woods and Glenn Dogherty’s deaths were unnecessary, preventable and lay on Obama’s head!

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our American dead. In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage.” -literary license taken with Shakespeare’s ‘Henry the Fifth’

 

After Choking Up Earlier Clinton Shouts: ‘What Difference … Does It Make?’

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225x150_HillaryLashWeekly Standard:

By Daniel Harper

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about ascertaining whether the Benghazi terror attack was the result of a protest by Senator Ron Johnson. “What difference, at this point, does it make?” Clinton shouted, seemingly losing her cool.

“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”

UPDATE: And earlier Clinton choked up:

“For me, this is not just a matter of policy, it’s personal,” said Clinton, holding back tears. “I stood next to President Obama as the Marines carried those flag-draped caskets off the plane at Andrews. I put my arms around the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters. It has been one of the greatest honors of my life to lead the men and women of the State Department and USAID. Nearly 70,000 serving here in Washington and at more than 275 posts around the world. They get up and go to work every day — often in difficult and dangerous circumstances thousands of miles from home — because they believe as we believe the United States is the most extraordinary force for peace and progress the earth has ever known.”

Hillary Speaks

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AP307742013715-540x414BY:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in congressional testimony delayed for several months amid charges of a cover-up, on Wednesday again took responsibility for the deaths of four Americans during the terror attack in Benghazi and defended the Obama administration’s shifting explanation for the Sept. 11, 2012, attack.

“As I have said many times since September 11, I take responsibility,” Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Nobody is more committed to getting this right. I am determined to leave the State Department and our country safer, stronger, and more secure.”

On the shifting accounts by the administration about the attack, the secretary of state defended the response, claiming she had called it “an attack by heavily armed militants.”

However, the cause of the attack and the identity of the attackers and their motives was unclear, she said.

“The picture remains still somewhat complicated,” Clinton said, adding that key questions about the perpetrators “remain to be determined.”

Clinton initially said in public statements after the attack that the cause was a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Muslim online video, a theme that critics have said fits the administration’s tendency to blame the United States, and not foreign Islamists, for sparking terrorism.

Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, were killed when several dozen armed attackers stormed and set on fire the diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

Although the attack was deliberate and coordinated, Clinton said it was not “indicative of extensive planning.”

A second attack took place at a CIA facility about a mile away. The CIA was reportedly involved in a covert arms program that may have involved shipping arms to Syrian Islamist rebels.

Read more at Free Beacon

Clinton acknowledges ‘spreading jihadist threat’

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Hillary Rodham ClintonBY:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sparred with lawmakers Wednesday over what they claimed was the Obama administration’s bungled response to the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Clinton became visibly irritated several times as she rebutted claims by Republican senators that the Obama administration intentionally misled the American public about the specific events that led to the deaths of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) told Clinton that her response to lawmakers was not up to par.

“The answers your given this morning frankly are not satisfactory to me,” McCain said, chiding Clinton for failing to account for the administration’s lapses in knowledge.

“Were you and the president made aware of the classified cable from chris stevens that said that the united states consulate in Benghazi could not survive a sustained assault,” McCain asked. “Numerous warnings, including personally to me about the security were unanswered, or unaddressed.”

“What was the president’s activities during that seven-hour period?” McCain added, pressing for details. “On the anniversary of the worst attack in American history, September 11th we didn’t have Department of Defense forces available for seven hours.”

McCain went on to reprimand Clinton for arguing that it makes no difference whether the Benghazi compound was stormed by armed militants or attacked by protestors.

“I categorically reject your answer to Senator [Ron] Johnson about, well we didn’t ask these survivors who were flown to Ramstein [air base] the next day, that they—that this was not a spontaneous demonstration,” McCain said. “To say it’s because an investigation was going on? The American people deserve to know answers, and they certainly don’t deserve false answers.”

The American people were deceived, McCain maintained.

“Answers that were given to the American people on September 15th by the ambassador to the United Nations [Susan Rice] were false—in fact contradicted by the classified information which was kept out of the Secretary to the United Nations report who by the way in the president’s words had nothing to do with Benghazi, which questions why she was sent out to start with,” McCain said.

“Why do we care? Because if the classified information had been included it gives an entirely different version of events to the American people,” McCain continued. “If you want to go out and tell the American people what happened you should at least have interviewed the people who were there, instead of saying, ‘No we couldn’t talk to them because a FBI investigation was going on.’ ”

“The American people, and the families of these four brave Americans still have not got gotten the answers that they deserve,” McCain said. “I hope that they will get them.”

Clinton warned that America faces a “spreading jihadist threat” that is endangering U.S. assets across the globe.

Clinton became the latest in a series of high-ranking U.S. government officials to publicly recognize the immediate threat that terrorist forces pose to U.S. embassies and other American outposts in the Middle East and North Africa.

“We now face a spreading jihadist threat,” Clinton said. “We have driven a lot of the operatives out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, killed a lot of them, including [Osama] Bin Laden.”

“But this is a global movement,” Clinton said. “We can kill leaders, but until we help establish strong democratic institutions, until we do a better job with values and relationships, we will be faced with this level of instability.”

Read more at Free Beacon

Hillary Clinton’s legacy

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HCCenter for Security Policy | Jan 22, 2013

By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

This week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be making her swan song appearance on Capitol Hill, providing at last to Senate  and House panels her testimony about the Benghazigate scandal. Under  the circumstances, legislators may feel pressured to be deferential and  to keep their questions more limited in scope and superficial rather  than probing. For the good of the country, it is imperative that they  resist going soft.

After all, the hearings Wednesday before the  two chambers’ committees responsible for foreign policy oversight afford  the final opportunity to examine with the sitting secretary of state  her legacy with regard not only to the fiasco that left four Americans  dead in Benghazi last Sept. 11, but with the policies that led up to  that event – policies that are roiling the region today and that will  afflict us for many years to come.

In other words, the object of the exercise must be to understand how we got to the point in Libya  where Shariah-adherent jihadists felt able to attack American  facilities and diplomatic personnel murderously and with impunity.  Consequently, Mrs. Clinton’s interlocutors need to go beyond exploring the record of repeated rejections of requests from Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and others to enhance security at the “mission” in Benghazi and the lack of U.S. response once the attack was launched.

Legislators must ensure that the following issues, for example, are also addressed:

Who  was responsible for devising and executing the policy of engaging,  legitimating, empowering, funding and arming Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood? It appears to date back to at least March 2009, when the United States first co-sponsored a Shariah-driven United Nations Human Rights Council resolution criticizing expressions that offend Islam. What role did Mrs. Clinton play in that initiative and in the broader policy of which it was a leading indicator?

What responsibility did Mrs. Clinton have for the serial Team Obama decisions that helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt? Is she concerned that, by so doing, Islamists determined not only to foster hatred for Israel but to pursue its destruction are now in a position to try again, for the first time since 1973? How does Mrs. Clinton justify, under such circumstances, sending to the Egyptian military  additional U.S.-made fighter planes and tanks – weapons whose use, as a  practical matter, can only be for waging war against the Israelis?

Does Mrs. Clinton recognize that the wholly predictable effect of overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi was to unleash al Qaeda-linked forces like Ansar al Shariah in Libya and arm them and their counterparts in places like Mali and Algeria?  Was Ambassador Stephens in Benghazi on Sept. 11 in connection with the  transfer of such weapons from Libyan sources to Syrian “rebels” – who  include elements like the al Nusra front that even the State Department  has designated a terrorist organization?

Who was responsible for promoting the fraudulent narratives that al Qaeda  is basically the only enemy we face and that it is, as President Obama  repeatedly declared during the campaign, “on the path to defeat”? Does Mrs. Clinton  agree with either of those statements, let alone both, in the face of  abundant evidence that Islamists of various stripes are trying to  destroy us (some of whom associate themselves publicly with al Qaeda, many of whom do not) and that such Islamists are at the moment in the process of taking over countries, in whole or in part?

Does Mrs. Clinton  support the release of the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdul Rahman, from federal  prison where he is currently serving a life sentence, as a further  gesture of support for Mohammed Morsi? Since her department authorized a  visa last year so that a designated terrorist, Hani Nour Eldin, could  visit the White House to discuss such a release, does she believe that  step would reduce or increase the jihadists’ conviction that they are  winning? If the latter, wouldn’t it merely have the effect of prompting  them to redouble their efforts to make us, in the words of the Koran,  “feel subdued,” meaning more violent jihadism?

Surely the Islamists’ have perceived as further proof of their ascendancy the so-called “Istanbul Process” over which Mrs. Clinton  has personally presided. This multinational diplomatic exercise has as  its objective bringing about convergence between Shariah’s blasphemy  laws, which prohibit expression that offends Islam and its adherents,  and our First Amendment, which guarantees our right to engage in it,  among other types of speech, writings, videos, etc.

Mrs. Clinton  aggressively promoted the line that just such an offensive video was  responsible for the attack in Benghazi and that the video maker must be  subjected to, in her words, “shaming and peer pressure.” Now that we  know that was not the case, does she regret finding a pretext to  incarcerate him for a year and fostering the Istanbul Process that  threatens the freedom of expression of every other American?

Finally, The Washington Post reported in 2007 that “[Huma] 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.” Has  that continued to be the case during the past four years in which Ms.  Abedin served as the secretary of state’s deputy chief of staff? If so,  what role has she played in the development and adoption of the  foregoing, misbegotten policies?

The American people need to know the answers to such questions. Congress has a duty to ensure they are asked.

Beyond Benghazi: questions for Clinton

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Clinton: Responsible for broad policy failures in the entire region.

Clinton: Responsible for broad policy failures in the entire region.

By John Bolton at the New York Post:

The State Department’s Accountability Review Board last week issued a devastating report on the events leading up to the Sept. 11 assassination of four Americans at our Benghazi consulate. Unfortunately, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has still not faced questioning by Congress or the media more than three months after the tragedy.

A series of excuses has conveniently allowed her to escape cross examination until after the ARB report was released. Clinton sails right along, now preparing the first steps for what is widely expected to be her 2016 presidential campaign.

Last week, however, Sen. Bob Corker asserted that no new secretary of state be confirmed until Clinton testifies. Corker, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee starting in January, was joined by Sen. Lindsey Graham. Their idea provides a strong incentive to committee Chairman John Kerry, now tapped as Clinton’s successor, to schedule her testimony.

The starting point for questioning Clinton is realizing that the Benghazi debacle embodies both policy and management failures. The administration’s utterly wrong-headed view of the Middle East created an atmosphere that fostered tragically erroneous management decisions. Clinton’s blithe disregard of the actual political reality in Libya and four years of not attending to seemingly mundane management issues represented a palpable failure of leadership directly contributing to the Benghazi tragedy.

The ARB did not blame specific individuals, citing instead “systemic” failures. Clinton’s deputies, testifying in her absence on Dec. 20, conceded that State had not “connected the dots” as security deteriorated in Libya and the Middle East generally.

But in any organization, there is only one “first chair,” and Clinton must answer why she (and President Obama) was so convinced that the war on terror was over and al Qaeda defeated; that “leading from behind” in overthrowing Khadafy had succeeded, and that the Arab Spring was bringing stability and democracy to Libya and the region more broadly.

The Benghazi tragedy disproved all these assertions, and Clinton is accountable for the broad policy failures, not just the deadly specifics. Congressional hearings should go well beyond the ARB report. The basic questions Clinton now must answer are straightforward: What did she know; when did she know it — and what did she do about it, before, during and after the Sept. 11 attacks? Here are some elaborations:

* Before the attack, was Clinton aware of the security threats to our consulate and other international presences in Benghazi? Did she know about repeated Tripoli embassy requests for enhanced security? If not, why not?

Libya was a centerpiece of supposed success in Obama’s foreign policy, not some country of small significance and low threat levels. It is important to establish not only the actual paper trail in this case, but even more importantly why, on such a critical foreign-policy issue, it did not automatically come to Clinton’s seventh-floor office.

* On Sept. 11, what were Clinton and Obama doing? We need a minute-by-minute chronology. When was she first told of the attack, and what was said? When and how many times did she speak with the president? What help did she ask for? Was it denied, and by whom? When did she retire for the evening?

* And in the tragedy’s aftermath, Clinton must explain how the administration came up with its story that the Benghazi attack grew out of a demonstration against the now-famous Mohammed video trailer. Clinton herself referred to the video at the Sept. 14 ceremony when the remains of the four murdered Americans returned home. On this point, the ARB was crystal clear that “no protest took place” before the attacks.

Obama will hold office for four more years, and Clinton apparently aspires to succeed him. Their worldview and its policy consequences must not be allowed to escape scrutiny as they did in the just-concluded presidential campaign. Most of the media have certainly shown little interest in exposing administration failures. Clinton’s testimony may be the last chance to do so for a long time.

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