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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Princess L on May 08, 2013, 09:49:25 AM
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Listening to first testimony (Gregory Hicks), how can anyone side with Hilary on "what difference does it make"? I'm tempted to use the 'C' word >:(
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Listening to first testimony, how can anyone side with Hilary on "what difference does it make"? I'm tempted to use the 'C' word >:(
She tried to make it go away by blustering and bullying her way through her "testimony," now the chickens are coming home to roost.
She may be looking 20 years older by the time this is all over.
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4 people died and hillary and obama lied their fucking asses off to cover up the incompetence
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4 people died and hillary and obama lied their fucking asses off to cover up the incompetence
From the VERY BEGINNING!
A YouTube video ::) F'g "C"
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"It happend along time ago" - Jay "Carnival" Carney
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http://redflagnews.com/headlines/dem-congressman-at-benghazi-hearing-death-is-a-part-of-life
Just fucking wow
This is the typical defintion of a worthless piece of trash. Elijah Cummings is another worthless shitstain who should be deported somewhere
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Unreal - this is the typical Obama slave piece of garbage who defends literally anything this communist shit bag does
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"the youtube video was a non issue in libya", Mr Hicks. - [slam duck]
Hillary and Obama are two disgusting traitors and belong in jail.
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"I was stunned, my jaw dropped," Gregory Hicks Foreign Service Officer and former Deputy Chief of Mission/Chargé d’Affairs in Libya told the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Hicks was referring to his reaction of Susan Rice saying that the attack was spontaneous and evolved out of a protest. Representative Gowdy read and email from Beth Jones of the State Department identifying the attackers of the Benghazi consulate as being "affiliated with Islamic terrorists."
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[ Invalid YouTube link ]
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wow
Fucking wow
FU Obama FU HITLERY
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/08/whistle-blowers-testify-on-benghazi-attacks
Unreal.
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Package it up with the testimony and all that we now know and the RNC will have quite the ad campaign to fire off if this piece of shit decides to run for President.
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They're bring the MSM into this kicking and screaming but I think if this gets any bigger...Obama will sacrifice Hil to the wolves with gleeful pleasure. There is no love lost by all accounts between the Obama and Clinton camps. If thats the case...Hil will hit back. Bill will say some carefully placed comments here and there about god knows what and turn this against Obama. Right now everybody is rowing in the same direction. If the anybody in the MSM wants to make a name for themselves, then maybe they can fracture the story. As it stands now it looks like the whitehouse is full of shit. I want to think better of Hil but they failed and folks died. This could be a case study in how the MSM has and does protect Dems in general and Obama in particular. Ailes and the folks at Fox are giddy right now.
I know for an absolute undisputable fact that a MARSOC unit was told to stand down from going in. I don;'t know when they would have arrived based on the timeline but it would appear that they would have saved some lives. A very good friend was with the unit.
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by Joel B. Pollak8 May 2013, 11:32 AM PDT
1. Two "stand-down" orders were given while the Benghazi attacks were in progress.
2. The "protest" about a YouTube video was a complete fabrication by the Obama administration.
3. Cheryl Mills, Clinton's lawyer at the State Department, told witnesses not to speak to House investigators.
4. The diplomatic personnel on the ground acted with incredible, unheralded heroism.
5. Democrats came to rebut the eyewitnesses with talking points.
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If DOS folks are turining on the Clinton and the admin its serious. I've worked with these people. They tend to be the most touchy feely of the gov agencies...very Lib if anything.
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This could be a case study in how the MSM has and does protect Dems in general and Obama in particular.
What do you mean by "the MSM"? Fox News is far and above the king of the hill in the realm of cable news -- so much so that it is fair to say that most (in the logical sense of 'at least 50+1%', i.e., a majority) viewers of cable news receive a rather anti-Democrat, anti-Obama, pro-Republican message (all things considered). Plainly, then, if by "the MSM" you mean all or even most of the media (defined in terms of viewership), you are sorely mistaken. If you simply mean something like 'a majority of news organizations,' you're right but in a trivial way since viewership is what's really relevant here.
(http://stateofthemedia.org/files/2012/03/2_Cable_CNN-Bounced-Back-in-Prime-Time.png)
http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/cable-cnn-ends-its-ratings-slide-fox-falls-again/cable-by-the-numbers/http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/cable-cnn-ends-its-ratings-slide-fox-falls-again/cable-by-the-numbers/
HLN -- 385,500 viewers
CNN -- 654,500
MSNBC -- 773,000
Fox News Channel -- 1.9 million
I've worked with these people. They tend to be the most touchy feely of the gov agencies...very Lib if anything.
We can't ignore the possibility of individuals protecting their own asses, grandstanding for their own gain, and/or continuing an intra-department rivalry/hatefest of some sort or other. Still, all of this is still consistent with a fuck up at the upper levels, I suppose.
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http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/05/08/HICKS-Operators-Furious-When-Given-Order-To-Stand-Down
Unreal - if anyone still supports obama - go jump off a fucking bridge
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W Files Three New Lawsuits Against Obama Administration for Concealing Benghazi
More than six months have passed since the 9/11/2012 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, which killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, and we are no closer to the truth about what happened. And this is for one reason and one reason only – Obama secrecy.
The American people have watched the Obama administration trot out witnesses before congressional committees investigating the attacks. Americans have watched Obama officials make the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows. In the end is more lies and more stonewalling and more broken promises to “get to the bottom of it.”
If you would like to receive weekly emails updating you about all of our efforts to fight corruption, please sign up here.
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Judicial Watch Weekly Update
There seems to be a systematic effort by the Obama administration to shield key documentary evidence from the American people. This is where Judicial Watch is focusing its attention. JW has filed multiple Freedom of Information Act requests and recently filed three lawsuits against the Obama State Department to try to gain access to records that could shed light on what happened that day, who responded, and how.
Benghazi Lawsuit No. 1: JW Seeks U.S. Consulate Videos at Time of Attack
Judicial Watch sued the State Department seeking “all videos and photographs” depicting the Benghazi, Libya Consulate between September 10 and September 13, 2012, the period leading up to, during, and immediately following the deadly attack.
Specifically, Judicial Watch seeks the following records pursuant to its December 19, 2012, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request:
“Any and all videos and photographs depicting U.S. Consulate facilities in Benghazi, Libya (including the Special Mission Compound and the Annex) between September 10, 2012, and September 13, 2012, that were provided to the Accountability Review Board (ARB) for Benghazi and/or to any individual member of the ARB.”
The State Department acknowledged receiving the Judicial Watch FOIA request on January 4, 2013, and was required by law to respond by February 4, 2013. So far, no documents have been produced.
The Obama administration cannot claim it came up empty in trying to locate the records. The records exist for certain because they are referenced by the ARB, which was convened by then – Secretary of State Clinton last December, in its final report.
In fact, according to ARB Chairman Ambassador Tom Pickering, the Board “reviewed thousands of documents and watched hours of video” during the course of its investigation. The Obama administration also reportedly shared Benghazi video with certain members of Congress. The State Department, however, has refused to comply with JW’s FOIA seeking access to these materials on behalf of the American people.
“It’s an easy guess as to why the Obama administration is refusing to turn these records over. Any video or photos will tell us more about Benghazi – in contrast to the lies and spin coming out of Obama administration officials,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
Benghazi Lawsuit Number 2: JW Seeks Details Regarding Contract with Foreign Security Company
In another FOIA lawsuit against the Obama State Department, Judicial Watch seeks access to records concerning a contract totaling nearly $400,000 that was awarded to a foreign firm for “Security Guards and Patrol Services” at the Benghazi Consulate prior to the Benghazi attacks. This contract was signed on February 17, 2012, and May 3, 2012, and at the time was identified only as “Award ID SAQMMA12COO92.” Judicial Watch filed its lawsuit on February 25, 2013.
Specifically, Judicial Watch seeks the following pursuant to a November 7, 2012, FOIA request:
Any and all records regarding, concerning, or related to the $387,413.68 contract awarded by the Department of State to an unidentified foreign awardee for “Security Guards and Patrol Services.” According to the record of this expenditure on USASpending.gov, the contract was signed on February 17, 2012, and May 3, 2012, and is identified by Award ID SAQMMA12COO92.
The State Department acknowledged receiving the November 7, 2012, Judicial Watch FOIA request on November 12, 2012, and was required by law to respond by December 20, 2012, at the latest. Yet again, as of the date of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, JW has not received a meaningful response.
And what is suspicious about this contract?
According to Breitbart.com, when first questioned about foreign Benghazi security guards on Friday, September 14, 2012, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland emphatically denied that State had hired any private firm to provide security at the American mission in Benghazi:
QUESTION: (Inaudible) the claim was made yesterday that a company that is a spinoff of Blackwater, in fact, proposed or contracted the United States Government for this particular kind of eventuality, and it was caught up in some sort of bureaucratic –
MS. NULAND: Completely untrue with regard to Libya. I checked that this morning. At no time did we plan to hire a private security company for Libya.
QUESTION: Toria [stet], I just want to make sure I understood that, because I didn’t understand your first question. You said – your first answer. You said that at no time did you have contracts with private security companies in Libya?
MS. NULAND: Correct.
However, on September 17, 2012, WIRED magazine broke the story that Nuland had provided false information in her September 14 press conference, saying: “Contrary to Friday’s claim by State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland that ‘at no time did we contract with a private security firm in Libya,’ the department inked a contract for ‘security guards and patrol services’ on May 3, 2012, for $387,413.68. An extension option brought the tab for protecting the consulate to $783,000. The contract lists only ‘foreign security awardees’ as its recipient.”
In her daily press briefing on Tuesday, September 18, 2012, Nuland admitted that she had made an “error” concerning the State Department’s hiring of foreign security firms in Benghazi. “There was a group called Blue Mountain Group, which is a private security company with permits to operate in Libya,” Nuland said. “They were hired to provide local Libyan guards who operated inside the gate doing things like operating the security access equipment, screening cars, that kind of thing.”
According to Breitbart.com, Blue Mountain was chosen for the Benghazi security operation because it was willing to sign the State Department Rules of Engagement for Libya prohibiting guards from carrying weapons with live ammunition.
Benghazi Lawsuit Number 3: JW Seeks “Doctored” Talking Points Memo
Judicial Watch filed a FOIA lawsuit on February 14, 2013, against the Obama Administration’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence seeking access to a controversial “speaking points” memo that seems to suggest that intelligence officials believed from the outset that al Qaeda was behind the attack despite public statements to the contrary issued by Obama administration officials, including UN Ambassador Susan Rice and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Specifically, JW seeks:
Any and all memoranda, assessments, analyses, and/or talking points regarding the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya and/or the killing of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence between September 11, 2012, and September 20, 2012. This request includes, but is not limited to, the “speaking points” memorandum referred to by Senator Dianne Feinstein during a televised interview on October 17, 2012….
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged receiving JW’s request on October 19, 2012, and was required by law to respond by November 26, 2012. However, as of the date of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, the agency failed to produce any records responsive to the request, indicate when any responsive records will be produced, or demonstrated that responsive records are exempt from production.
Regarding the “speaking points” memorandum requested by Judicial Watch, according to the CBS television affiliate in San Francisco, Senator Feinstein said: “When asked by CBS 5 if there was an intelligence flaw, the senior California senator [Feinstein] who hails from San Francisco replied: ‘I think what happened was the director of intelligence…put out some speaking points on the initial intelligence assessment. I think that was possibly a mistake.’”
Former CIA Director General David Petraeus reportedly testified before Congress that the initial speaking points produced by the CIA “stated there were indications the attack was linked to al Qaeda,” and suggested the terrorism reference was removed sometime during an interagency review process.
In the days and weeks following the Benghazi attacks, the Obama administration blamed the incident on a rudimentary Internet video deemed offensive to Muslims. This false claim was repeated by both Ambassador Rice and Secretary Clinton in multiple public statements and press interviews.
For example, at a September 14, 2012, event honoring the four victims of the Benghazi attack, then-Secretary of State Clinton made the following statement: “We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen the rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful video that we had nothing to do with.”
Did Hillary Clinton know this was a lie when she said it? She certainly was in no mood to talk about it during her testimony before Congress. When asked about the alleged discrepancy between the intelligence community’s assessment and the Obama administration’s public statements during congressional testimony, Ms. Clinton shouted, “What difference does it make?…I personally was not focused on talking points.”
“With all of the Benghazi lies coming out of the Obama administration, the only way to get at the truth is to release these records immediately,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The Obama administration’s lawless Benghazi cover-up is a disgrace and an insult to the victims of the attacks and their families. The Obama Benghazi scandal makes Iran-Contra seem like patty-cake by comparison.”
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it's awesome to see people giving a shit and demanding an actual investigation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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"This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing do to with.”
She said this at the funeral knowing full well it was all lies
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http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=right-wing%20troll%20notification%20system%20test%20%20&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CC0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fmike-in-raleigh%2Fright-wing-troll-notification&ei=6tCKUc7_Ccav0AHN4YHQCQ&usg=AFQjCNHjZ7eukewu4yXMi97uSel9P315Zw
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The testimony has been amazing.
Unfuckingreal how any of these douchebag libs can support Obama. Mindless fucking drones.
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Just think - Obama went to bed as that whole thing unfolded. Then he lied about it.
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gop has no credibility they are exploiting it rather than investigating it,again this goes no where
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gop has no credibility they are exploiting it rather than investigating it,again this goes no where
lol...delusional at best.
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lol...delusional at best.
when it's all said and done nothing happens,
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when it's all said and done nothing happens,
Probably not given mindless tards like you don't find this extremely disturbing.
Of course you can't remove the politics from the investigation.
But fuck dude, have you actually been listening to what went down? Those are not politicians testifying.
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I'm sure this is not the first embassy attacked and it won't be the last,this is politics at it's best
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I'm sure this is not the first embassy attacked and it won't be the last,this is politics at it's best
That's not the issue and you know it.
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That's not the issue and you know it.
that's the whole point of this,if you don't think so your pretty gullible
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That's not the issue and you know it.
What is the issue in your opinion?
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that's the whole point of this,if you don't think so your pretty gullible
No, the political aspect is, of course, to make Obama look bad.
But just because you don't agree with that aspect, doesn't mean that we should hide from the truth of what went down. Denial sure as hell isn't going to help either side in the future.
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No, the political aspect is, of course, to make Obama look bad.
But just because you don't agree with that aspect, doesn't mean that we should hide from the truth of what went down. Denial sure as hell isn't going to help either side in the future.
You know what....ill buy that... we all here know that this is just to make obama look bad and if this was a republican president at the time, dems would do the same thing...but i would say the fake motives dont take away from the facts. My only issue is, its a waste of time to most American people. The GOP tried the fake outrage during the election and still got dusted. I think the focus should be put on something that can actually be changed.
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What is the issue in your opinion?
Politically it's to badger Obama.
Non-politically it's about a massive failure of people in his administration to effectively handle the incident. It's about incompetence in key decision making roles and it doesn't appear to be limited to political appointees, but maybe even some career officials who should have been more competent (that last part is speculation and remains to be seen).
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I'm sure this is not the first embassy attacked and it won't be the last,this is politics at it's best
Holy shit blacken, that's not the dispute. It's the way this was handled, or not handled if you prefer. It happed on 9/11, they blamed a video, they turned down cries for help. Damn, seriously. How can you or anyone else defend this?
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gop has no credibility they are exploiting it rather than investigating it,again this goes no where
Exploiting what? A proven cover up with four murders? Should we just sweep it under the rug? What about the promises made by Obama and Clinton to the families? What about the families, you don't think they deserve answers?Holy shit, is commonsense lacking Thay much?
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Obama could care less about the promises to the famlies. The funerals interfered with his golf game. Obama is a lying piece of shit. They're trying to lay blame on Hil and thats where this ends up. Bill won't take that lying down. If this was a repub president we'd get wall to wall coverage of this....only an alien invasion would divert them.
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You know what....ill buy that... we all here know that this is just to make obama look bad and if this was a republican president at the time, dems would do the same thing...but i would say the fake motives dont take away from the facts. My only issue is, its a waste of time to most American people. The GOP tried the fake outrage during the election and still got dusted. I think the focus should be put on something that can actually be changed.
Bull fucking shit--- Its this kind of sick delusion that has all the Obama sychophants lying to themselves about having the moral high ground. You and the rest of the dick tugging Obama apologists are pathetic. As an American, if the Bengazzi situation doesn't outrage you, nothing will.
This treasonous coverup was orchestrated for the sole purpose of keeping Obama in power through the election. To manipulate the American public, no expense was spared. Here are some of the more outrageous aspects of the Bengazzi story:
1) The first amendment= thrown out the window. An American citizen had to go into hiding over a youtube video that NOBODY IN THE MIDDLE EAST EVER WATCHED IN THE FIRST PLACE. That same American citizen is now rotting in a Federal prison thanks to Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and Eric Holder.
2) Next, the Obama Administration wasted 10's of millions of dollars running an apology ad campaign for the video in hell holes like Pakistan to reassure Muslims that Americans are not Islamophobic. ::)
3) The Obama Administration credited the noble efforts of the Libyan people to save Ambassador Stevens by taking him to the hospital. In actuality, Stevens was sodomized with a Bayonet and taken to an Al Qaeda controlled hospital.
4) Two brave marines defied direct orders not to intervene and save the Ambassador-- they fought valiantly outnumbered and outgunned. What was their repayment? Hours upon hours of frenzied calls for backup went ignored while the President campaigned in Las Vegas and military personnel refused to provide any assistance on their behalf.
5) Susan Rice was paraded around the talk shows like a pack mule for two solid weeks blaming a non existent you tube video for the attacks-- And the slimy liberal media establishment followed suit and covered Obama's ass.
6) When whistle blowers tried to get the real story out, they were intimidated, threatened and harassed.
This is not political gamesmanship. This is something far more sinister and serious. There should be hell to pay. And God willing, there will be.
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Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Bob Corker (R-TN) said Wednesday that he's "fairly satisfied" with the Obama administration's account of events that led to the deaths of American diplomats in Benghazi last year.
"We need to know were these people culpable or not. If they were, why are they still on the payroll? Other than that, I've been able to read all the cables. I've seen the films," Corker told MSNBC. "I feel like I know what happened in Benghazi. I'm fairly satisfied."
He cautioned House Republicans to be "respectful" if they probe the issue further.
"Look, if the House wants to have hearings," he said, "I hope they're done in a respectful way and hopefully it will shed some light on what happened."
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GOP Star Witnesses Debunk Right-Wing Benghazi Conspiracy Theories
Source: Thinkprogress.org
The “whistleblowers” at today’s House Oversight Committee hearing on what really happened in Benghazi, Libya last September were supposed to break the dam that would lead to President Obama’s eventual downfall, in the eyes of conservatives. Instead, these witness actually served to debunk several theories that the right-wing has pushed on Benghazi, leaving the hearing a fizzle for the GOP:
Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/05/08/1982151/witnesses-debunk-benghazi/
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Bull fucking shit--- Its this kind of sick delusion that has all the Obama sychophants lying to themselves about having the moral high ground. You and the rest of the dick tugging Obama apologists are pathetic. As an American, if the Bengazzi situation doesn't outrage you, nothing will.
This treasonous coverup was orchestrated for the sole purpose of keeping Obama in power through the election. To manipulate the American public, no expense was spared. Here are some of the more outrageous aspects of the Bengazzi story:
1) The first amendment= thrown out the window. An American citizen had to go into hiding over a youtube video that NOBODY IN THE MIDDLE EAST EVER WATCHED IN THE FIRST PLACE. That same American citizen is now rotting in a Federal prison thanks to Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and Eric Holder.
2) Next, the Obama Administration wasted 10's of millions of dollars running an apology ad campaign for the video in hell holes like Pakistan to reassure Muslims that Americans are not Islamophobic. ::)
3) The Obama Administration credited the noble efforts of the Libyan people to save Ambassador Stevens by taking him to the hospital. In actuality, Stevens was sodomized with a Bayonet and taken to an Al Qaeda controlled hospital.
4) Two brave marines defied direct orders not to intervene and save the Ambassador-- they fought valiantly outnumbered and outgunned. What was their repayment? Hours upon hours of frenzied calls for backup went ignored while the President campaigned in Las Vegas and military personnel refused to provide any assistance on their behalf.
5) Susan Rice was paraded around the talk shows like a pack mule for two solid weeks blaming a non existent you tube video for the attacks-- And the slimy liberal media establishment followed suit and covered Obama's ass.
6) When whistle blowers tried to get the real story out, they were intimidated, threatened and harassed.
This is not political gamesmanship. This is something far more sinister and serious. There should be hell to pay. And God willing, there will be.
Great post. Fuck these sycophantic Obama drones. Fucking robots.
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Bull fucking shit--- Its this kind of sick delusion that has all the Obama sychophants lying to themselves about having the moral high ground. You and the rest of the dick tugging Obama apologists are pathetic. As an American, if the Bengazzi situation doesn't outrage you, nothing will.
This treasonous coverup was orchestrated for the sole purpose of keeping Obama in power through the election. To manipulate the American public, no expense was spared. Here are some of the more outrageous aspects of the Bengazzi story:
1) The first amendment= thrown out the window. An American citizen had to go into hiding over a youtube video that NOBODY IN THE MIDDLE EAST EVER WATCHED IN THE FIRST PLACE. That same American citizen is now rotting in a Federal prison thanks to Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and Eric Holder.
2) Next, the Obama Administration wasted 10's of millions of dollars running an apology ad campaign for the video in hell holes like Pakistan to reassure Muslims that Americans are not Islamophobic. ::)
3) The Obama Administration credited the noble efforts of the Libyan people to save Ambassador Stevens by taking him to the hospital. In actuality, Stevens was sodomized with a Bayonet and taken to an Al Qaeda controlled hospital.
4) Two brave marines defied direct orders not to intervene and save the Ambassador-- they fought valiantly outnumbered and outgunned. What was their repayment? Hours upon hours of frenzied calls for backup went ignored while the President campaigned in Las Vegas and military personnel refused to provide any assistance on their behalf.
5) Susan Rice was paraded around the talk shows like a pack mule for two solid weeks blaming a non existent you tube video for the attacks-- And the slimy liberal media establishment followed suit and covered Obama's ass.
6) When whistle blowers tried to get the real story out, they were intimidated, threatened and harassed.
This is not political gamesmanship. This is something far more sinister and serious. There should be hell to pay. And God willing, there will be.
7) Beth Jones covering up
8) Hicks not even being interviewed - despite the fact that he was the most senior person there.
9) Denying the LTC and his seal team the opportunity to go help.
10) Lying to the military attache
What difference at this point do all of these lies make ::)
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You know what....ill buy that... we all here know that this is just to make obama look bad and if this was a republican president at the time, dems would do the same thing...but i would say the fake motives dont take away from the facts. My only issue is, its a waste of time to most American people. The GOP tried the fake outrage during the election and still got dusted. I think the focus should be put on something that can actually be changed.
Bull fucking shit. You know what? This is why obama voters like yourself are worthless drones - 4 dead, coverup, obama lying to your face, democrats on the panel covering it up for that ghetto shithead you worship and the best you can do is blame the GOP for bringing up this collosal failure of obama?
No wonder this country is in the toilet.
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Obama and Hillary belong in prison over this
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Hmm.... yep, politicians still suck, and more good people are dead.
Sounds like just another day at the office.
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Obama voters who cover for their messiah if he raped a nun on the front lawn of the WH.
If the testimony today did not make you want to ktfo everyone in the WH and DOS than you are a communist and pos
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The White House on Wednesday stood by its story that the Obama administration remained unsure exactly who was responsible for the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi nearly five days after it occurred even though new revelations show Ansar al-Sharia’s direct involvement.
Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya and a self-described whistleblower, testified before a Congressional committee Wednesday that the body of Ambassador J. Christpher Stevens was missing for hours during the attack after being dragged out of the diplomatic post in Benghazi.
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SEE RELATED: Latest on Benghazi: Whistleblowers give Congress blow-by-blow account of deadly diplomatic attack
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He said a Libyan official eventually called him that night to inform him Mr. Stevens had died and that his body was at a hospital run by Ansar al-Sharia. Mr. Hicks said it was the saddest phone call of his life.
Terrorists set fire to the diplomatic post to try to force Mr. Stevens and his staff out of a “safe house” part of the post. It was a petroleum fire, which produces deadly cyanide gas.
White House spokesman Jay Carney cautioned that he could not immediately respond to live testimony from the committee but went on to say that the administration remained unsure of the identity and affiliations of the attackers, noting that Ansar al-Sharia had taken credit for it on Twitter but then later recanted.
“What I can tell you is that it was the assessment of our intelligence community that the attacks were participated in by extremists,” he told reporters at a regular daily briefing. “That’s what I’ve said. That’s what Ambassador Rice said. She said on that Sunday that extremists were involved. What we didn’t know is what their exact affiliation was.”
“As you know, with regard to this group, there was a claim of responsibility, then there was a disowning of responsibility. So anybody who pretends to have known all the facts instantly is just mistaken,” he continued. “And it is always the case that things like this require careful investigation.”
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/8/white-house-stands-its-benghazi-story-hearing-unfo/#ixzz2SlFbfJWM
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter
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don't let the facts get in the way of your repub cryfest :D :D :D
1. F-16s could have been sent to Benghazi
Part of the prevailing theory surrounding the events the night of the Benghazi attacks is that the Obama administration did not do enough militarily to respond to the crisis. Gregory Hicks — a Foreign Service Officer and the former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya — claimed during his pre-hearing testimony that fighter jets could have been flown over Benghazi, preventing the second wave of the attack from occurring.
Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) questioned that statement, asking Hicks whether he disagreed with Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Gen Martin Dempsey’s assessment that no air assets were in range the night of the attack. Hicks didn’t disagree, saying he was “speaking from [his] perspective” and what “veteran Libyan revolutionaries” told him, rather than Pentagon assessments.
2. Hillary Clinton signed cables denying additional security to Benghazi
House Republicans came to the conclusion in their interim report on Benghazi that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied to them about what she knew and when during her testimony this January. This includes her statement that at no time was she aware of requests for additional security at the diplomatic facility in Benghazi prior to the attack.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) used her time to take issue with this claim, asking all three witnesses about standard protocol for cables leaving the State Department. All three agreed with Maloney, that the Secretary of State’s name is placed at the bottom of all outgoing cables and telegrams from Foggy Bottom, whether the Secretary has viewed them or not, shooting down the GOP claim.
3. A Special Forces Team that could have saved lives was told to stand down
One of the most shocking reveals in the lead-up to today’s hearing was that a team of Special Forces in Tripoli were told not to deploy to Benghazi during the attack. That decision has led to an uproar on the right, including claims of dereliction of duty towards Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey for not taking actions that could have saved lives.
During questioning, Hicks confirmed that the team was ready to be deployed — not to join the fighting at the CIA annex — but “to secure the airport for the withdrawal of our personnel from Benghazi after the mortar attack.” Hicks also confirmed that it was the second such team to be readied for deployment, with the first having proceeded to Benghazi earlier. Despite the second team not deploying, the staff was all evacuated first to Tripoli, then to Germany, within 18 hours of the attack taking place.
4. The State Department’s Accountability Review Board isn’t legitimate
Republicans have been attacking the State Department’s official in-house review of the shortcomings seen before, during, and after the assault in Benghazi. That criticism prompted House Republicans to write their own report. When asked point blank about the recommendations of the Board, however, the witnesses didn’t cooperate with the GOP narrative. “Absolutely,” Eric Nordstrom, the Regional Security Officer for Libya prior to the assault in Benghazi, answered when asked if he believes implementing the recommendations would improve security. “I had an opportunity to review that along with other two committee reports. I think taken altogether, they’re fairly comprehensive and reasonable.” Hicks, when questioned, said that while he had some issues with the process by which the Board gathered its information, he demurred on criticizing the report itself.
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Funny how they did not address obamas lies on the youtube video
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Funny how they did not address obamas lies on the youtube video
yeah but but but ::) give it up it's all done,time to find another breaking story beck :D :D :D :D :D :D
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http://specialoperationsspeaks.com/articles/whistleblower-obama-knows-who-was-behind-benghazi-attack-has-no-intent-to-capture
f OBAMA
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http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/video-maker-blamed-for-benghazi-remains-jailed
>:(
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/us/politics/official-offers-account-from-libya-of-benghazi-attack.html?_r=0
Unreal.
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http://www.libertynews.com/2013/05/dem-strategist-blasts-liberals-who-defend-those-responsible-for-benghazi-cover-up-video
The leftists defending obama on this are beyond contempt
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hahaha so true
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hahaha so true
mother......fucking..... ....
BOOM
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mother......fucking.........
BOOM
You really are pathetic. You did not watch five minutes of the testimony and rely upon the distortions of a comedian to assure yourself that the ghetto street pimp you worship and his white hoebag who does $5 tricks for him did nothing wrong here.
The Cult of Obama lives strong
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You really are pathetic. You did not watch five minutes of the testimony and rely upon the distortions of a comedian to assure yourself that the ghetto street pimp you worship and his white hoebag who does $5 tricks for him did nothing wrong here.
The Cult of Obama lives strong
everything this guy said Above is factual....100% factual..
During the bush years there were 50+ embassy attacks with 3 Amerians being killed...and zero outrage from Fox news.. whats the difference.
you see...i know you like to gloss over the facts and disqualify it by saying "its a comedian saying it" so hopefully you dont have to comment on it...but if its 12 oclock....and a comedian says "hey guys its 12 oclock"...is he wrong?
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everything this guy said Above is factual....100% factual..
During the bush years there were 50+ embassy attacks with 3 Amerians being killed...and zero outrage from Fox news.. whats the difference
Um lets see:
1. The ambassador begged for for more security - denied by obama admn
2. They begged for help during the attack - nothing sent
3. the guys on the ground told them it was a terrorist attack and obama and hillary lied blaming a video they know and were told had nothing to do with it.
4. Obama and hitlery went to Crapistan and spent 75,000 on a tv commercial blaming the video
5. Susan Rice lied 5 times over
6. Obama and hillary lied about the video to the families
7. Obama promised to bring these people to justice - he was told who the group did it was and so far - not one arrest, not one person held accountable nothing
8. The Lybian PM said the tape had nothing to do with anything
You really are pathetic - as is Stewart. This was a terrorist attack on the Anniversary of 9/11 that obama had to cover up since he was running on "OBL dead GM alive bs" and had to try to convince the public that he decimated al queada and that his lybian policy was a success.
Like I said - obama could put you back into slavery and you would welcome and applaud it.
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http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=right-wing%20troll%20notification%20system%20test%20%20&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CC0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fmike-in-raleigh%2Fright-wing-troll-notification&ei=6tCKUc7_Ccav0AHN4YHQCQ&usg=AFQjCNHjZ7eukewu4yXMi97uSel9P315Zw
Um lets see:
1. The ambassador begged for for more security - denied by obama admn
2. They begged for help during the attack - nothing sent
3. the guys on the ground told them it was a terrorist attack and obama and hillary lied blaming a video they know and were told had nothing to do with it.
4. Obama and hitlery went to Crapistan and spent 75,000 on a tv commercial blaming the video
5. Susan Rice lied 5 times over
6. Obama and hillary lied about the video to the families
7. Obama promised to bring these people to justice - he was told who the group did it was and so far - not one arrest, not one person held accountable nothing
8. The Lybian PM said the tape had nothing to do with anything
You really are pathetic - as is Stewart. This was a terrorist attack on the Anniversary of 9/11 that obama had to cover up since he was running on "OBL dead GM alive bs" and had to try to convince the public that he decimated al queada and that his lybian policy was a success.
Like I said - obama could put you back into slavery and you would welcome and applaud it.
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Ive never been in slavery to be put back into it..
i was born in 1982
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Lt. Col. Ralph Peters On Benghazi: "How Much Evidence Does It Take?"
Related Videos | expand
LT. COL. RALPH PETERS: I believe that President Obama lied to the American people, himself. Secretary [Hillary] Clinton lied to Congress. Susan Rice lied to the UN. Jay Carney lied to the media. And the mainstream establishment media have protected this administration right down the line.
###
LT. COL. RALPH PETERS: Analytically speaking, the proof was there from the start if you want to see it. A court of law would have convicted on this kind of evidence. On Wednesday, it sounds like we're going to get smoking gun testimony. But, Bill, the point really to me is how much a president can get away with if the media [helps].
###
LT. COL. RALPH PETERS: Based on the preliminary word about what we're going to hear Wednesday in the testimony, the State counterterrorism chief and his people were cut out of the loop immediately.
BILL O'REILLY: But as soon as that was said today, that was denied by the State Department.
LT. COL. RALPH PETERS: And you got the number two man in Libya saying he knew and said from the beginning it was a terrorist attack. I mean, Bill, it gets to the point that how much evidence does it take? (The O'Reilly Factor, May 6, 2013)
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You really are pathetic. You did not watch five minutes of the testimony and rely upon the distortions of a comedian to assure yourself that the ghetto street pimp you worship and his white hoebag who does $5 tricks for him did nothing wrong here.
The Cult of Obama lives strong
The drones are quite the jokes.
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everything this guy said Above is factual....100% factual..
During the bush years there were 50+ embassy attacks with 3 Amerians being killed...and zero outrage from Fox news.. whats the difference.
you see...i know you like to gloss over the facts and disqualify it by saying "its a comedian saying it" so hopefully you dont have to comment on it...but if its 12 oclock....and a comedian says "hey guys its 12 oclock"...is he wrong?
like i've been saying for the past 4-5 years. when bush was in office every liberal democrat took everything the president did and turned it into a Hollywood movie like conspiracy theory. Now that Obama is in office they have all become consummate pragmatists and have an explanation that favors Obama for everything.
can we all just agree that Obama can do no wrong in the eyes of liberal democrats? can we all just agree that they will forgive everything......NO MATTER WHAT? what could the man do to anger his liberal constituency? seriously. i'm asking. what could he do? can any left leaning getbigger tell me?
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Blow-by-Blow: How Obama & Hillary Left Americans to Die
Posted By Arnold Ahlert On May 9, 2013 @ 12:55 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 95 Comments
Wednesday on Capitol Hill, three impeccable witnesses offered the clearest evidence to date that the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi before, during and after the terrorist attack that claimed the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, State Department employee Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen A. Doherty and Tyrone S. Woods, was a deadly combination of ineptitude, political calculations, and outright lying. 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, offered unshakeable testimony, despite efforts by several Democratic lawmakers to protect both the current administration and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, their party’s most viable presidential candidate for 2016. What the witnesses averred reveals a grim web of deceit likely orchestrated by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to cover up the order to ground U.S. rescue teams that could have easily saved our besieged countrymen in Benghazi.
Some of the most compelling and emotional testimony was provided by Hicks, who offered the House Oversight and Government Reform committee a damning blow-by-blow account of the September 11, 2012 attack: In Tripoli at the time, Hicks recounted how he had spoken with Stevens early in the evening, and there was no sign of unusual activity. After relaxing for a while, he got an alert that Benghazi was under attack. When he checked his cell phone he saw two numbers, one of which he didn’t recognize. He called that number first and got Stevens on the phone. “Greg! We’re under attack!” said Stevens, according to Mr. Hicks.
Later, when it became clear that Stevens was missing, the first concern was that he had been taken by terrorists. “We began to hear also that the ambassador’s been taken to a hospital,” said Hicks. “We learn that it is in a hospital which is controlled by Ansar al-Shariah, the group that Twitter feeds had identified as leading the attack on the consulate.” As this information was coming in, a “response team” from Tripoli arrived at the Benghazi airport, one that Hicks thought might become involved in a “hostage rescue” operation, even as officials worried they were being “baited into a trap.”
Hicks then spoke of the mortars that landed on the compound shortly after a group of Americans fleeing the consulate arrived at the annex. The first mortar landed among a group of Libyans who had helped bring the Americans to safety. “The next was short,” he said. “The next three landed on the roof.”
Those were the mortars that killed Doherty and Woods.
Hicks was visibly choked up when he recounted learning about Stevens’ death from the Libyan prime minister. ”I think it’s the saddest phone call I’ve ever had in my life,” he said.
In one of the most stunning portions of the hearing, Hicks confirmed the chilling refusal of the Obama administration to send in readily available U.S. assets to stop the consulate slaughter. This order to “stand down” was given not once, but at least twice. Hicks also revealed that an explicit order from the chain of command prevented a four-man special forces rescue team in Tripoli from getting to the Americans trapped at the annex. He noted the order came from ”either AFRICOM or SOCAFRICA” and that the team was “furious” when they were told to stand down. “I will quote Lieutenant Colonel Gibson,” said Hicks, referring to the officer on the receiving end of that command. “He said, ‘This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.’” Hicks’ testimony on this point directly contradicts recent statements from the Obama-run Pentagon. “There was never any kind of stand-down order to anybody,” said Maj. Robert Furman, Pentagon spokesman, on Monday.
Yet Mark Thompson also testified that he tried to get a Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST) comprised of special ops and intelligence personnel deployed, and he, too, was told to stand down. According to a source interviewed by Breitbart.com, only President Obama, or someone acting on his authority, could have given the stand down order. As we know from testimony provided by former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, President Obama met with the two officials on September 11 at 5 p.m. EDT for 30 minutes — less than an hour-and-a-half into the attack — and was supposedly never heard from him again for the rest of the evening. The very next day, Obama headed to a campaign fundraiser in Las Vegas.
The Obama administration undoubtedly understood that its decision to leave defenseless Americans, including our ambassador, to needlessly die at the hands of al-Qaeda-linked jihadists would not go over well for a commander-in-chief in the throes of a presidential election and a secretary of state angling for the Oval Office in 2016. Hicks’ testimony affirmed suspicions that administration officials conspired to conceal the nature of the attack by concocting an absolutely fictitious account of events involving a “spontaneous” attack prompted by an anti-Islam YouTube video. Hicks testified that he had personally told former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the Benghazi raid was a terrorist attack at 2 a.m. that same night. He recounted that ”everybody in the mission” believed it was an act of terror “from the get-go,” a reality echoed by Libyan President Mohammed al-Magariaf, who said his government had “no doubt that this was pre-planned, predetermined.” Magariaf made this assertion the very day before UN ambassador Susan Rice went out to peddle the lie that a “spontaneous demonstration” had gotten out of hand due to an Internet video.
When Hicks heard Rice, he was appalled. “My jaw dropped, and I was embarrassed,” he said.
In reality, Rice was a willing mouthpiece for the two biggest promoters of the Internet video lie: President Obama and Hillary Clinton. In fact, the State Department spent $70,000 to run advertisements in Pakistan featuring the two of them rejecting the contents of the video, and promoting tolerance for all religions. Even more remarkable, despite committee Democrats implying that a thorough investigation was conducted internally by the State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB), Hillary Clinton was never interviewed by the ARB.
Hillary’s entire take on the matter can be whittled down to the infamous statement she made during the U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing on May 8, 2013. After being questioned as to why the administration misled the American people, Clinton became indignant. “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans,” she said. “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?”
Eric Nordstrom, who became emotional when he described his friends and other personnel who lost their lives in the attack, provided an answer to that question. “It matters to me personally and it matters to my colleagues–to my colleagues at the Department of State,” he said, his voice breaking. “It matters to the American public for whom we serve. And, most importantly, it matters to the friends and family of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods who were murdered on September 11, 2012.”
Nordstrom further testified in writing that Hillary Clinton waived security requirements for the Benghazi consulate despite high and critical threat levels in the six categories of security standards established under the Overseas Security Policy Board and the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act of 1999. The waiver can only be authorized by the Secretary of State, who cannot delegate that responsibility to someone else. ”If the Secretary of State did not waive these requirements, who did so by ordering occupancy of the facilities in Benghazi and Tripoli?” Nordstrom wrote.
Nordstrom also offered his take on the ARB. ”I found the ARB process that I was involved in to be professional and the unclassified recommendations reasonable and positive. However, it is not what is contained within the report that I take exception to but what is left unexamined,” Nordstrom wrote. “Specifically, I’m concerned with the ARB’s decision to focus its attention at the Assistant Secretary level and below, where the ARB felt that ‘the decision-making in fact takes place,’” he wrote.
Hicks testified that the State Department actively sought to intimidate witnesses in order to prevent facts surrounding the Benghazi attack from being leaked. He revealed that a top State Department official called him to demand a report from his meeting with a congressional delegation and expressed unhappiness that a State Department lawyer was not present for the session. “I was instructed not to allow the RSO, the acting deputy chief of mission–me–to be personally interviewed,” he said. Later in the hearing, Hicks noted that State seemed especially concerned with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who has done yeoman’s work tracking down the survivors of the attack, kept under wraps by the administration. ”We were not to be personally interviewed by Congressman Chaffetz,” said Hicks, who added that Cheryl Mills, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, ”demanded a report on the visit” that did take place.
The State Department was caught in another lie yesterday as well. While the hearings were getting underway, Republicans revealed that Ambassador Thomas Pickering, co-chairman of the ARB, refused to testify. State countered that Republicans refused to let him. Frederick Hill, spokesman for Committee chairman Darryl Issa (R-CA), produced a letter dated February 22 inviting Pickering to testify. “Ambassador Pickering initially told the Committee he was not available on that date,” Hill told ABC News. “When asked about a different date, he said he was not inclined to testify.”
The State Department isn’t the only entity interested in controlling the flow of information in this tragedy. House Democrats embarrassingly struggled to distract from the proceedings with absurd non sequiturs and personal attacks. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the ranking Democratic at the Benghazi hearing, told one of the whistleblowers to “protect your fellow employees.” Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) suggested it was unpatriotic to challenge the administration’s narrative. “I find it truly disturbing and very unfortunate that when Americans come under attack, the first thing some did in this country was attack Americans,” she said. “Attack the military; attack the president; attack the State Department; attack the former senator from the great state of New York, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.” Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) blamed Republicans and congressional budget cuts for the terror attack, even as he apparently remains oblivious to the reality that it was Democrats who insisted the lion’s share of the budget cuts induced by sequestration come from the military.
Media are also shamelessly entrenched in the campaign to suppress the facts surround the Benghazi attack. Politico reports that CBS News execs are getting “increasingly frustrated” with premiere investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson’s stories on Benghazi, which they consider “dangerously close to advocacy.”
Dangerously close to honesty is more like it, which is exactly what CBS is worried about. As Washington Post explains, “While other media, particularly Fox News, have been similarly skeptical about the official narrative about Benghazi, Attkisson and CBS might put the story in a different light,” the paper reports. “As a much-decorated reporter from a news outlet often derided by conservatives as a liberal beacon, Attkisson and her network flip the usual script on this highly politicized story. That is, it’s hard to peg her and her network as Republican sympathizers out to score political points against a Democratic president.” With Attkisson, a self-described “political agnostic,” questioning the administration, Bengahzi can no longer be dismissed by the left as a vast right-wing conspiracy. “People can say what they want about me, I don’t care,” Attkisson says. “I just want to get the information out there.”
Attkisson notwithstanding, it remains to be seen whether the remainder of the mainstream media will now demand answers from the Obama administration on why it chose to needlessly throw American servicemen to the wolves in Benghazi and why, exactly, it was necessary to contrive a totally false account of events. The Obama administration is fighting hard to distract from the severity of the scandal. White House press secretary Jay Carney claimed that continued scrutiny of Benghazi is nothing more than an attempt by Republicans to ”politicize” the issue. ”This is a subject that has from its beginning been subject to attempts to politicize it by Republicans, while in fact what happened in Benghazi was a tragedy,” he said, adding that the incident has been ”been looked at exhaustively.” Carney further noted that the ongoing pursuit is ”part of an effort to chase after what isn’t the substance here.” The entire substance, according to Carney, is the reality that the consulate was attacked, four Americans were killed, and the president will make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Carney saved his most ridiculous assertion for last, claiming the administration’s editing of the talking points, in which wholesale changes and rampant deletions were made, (the details of which can be seen here) were “stylistic and not substantive.” “We’ve been very clear about the specific edits that were made at the suggestion of the White House.”
That is an utter lie. Version one of the CIA report included references to an “attack,” “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qa’ida,” the involvement of Ansar al Sharia and the fact that “wide availability of weapons and experienced fighters in Libya contributed to the lethality of the attacks,” which were all completely removed. Furthermore, at no time did any of the versions mention an anti-Islamic Internet video as being the catalyst for the attack.
The Obama administration can try spin this debacle any way it likes, but it can’t spin away four dead Americans, two separate “stand down” orders and the State Department’s advanced knowledge of inadequate security. They can’t change the reality that no rescue was even attempted over the course of a seven-hour battle, that brave Americans were left to fend for themselves, or that the administration sat on the details of this story for eight months — two most crucial of which occurred prior to the 2012 election. Even now the administration continues to stonewall every effort to get to the truth.
But with the truth finally coming to the surface, the remaining question observers are left with is why the Obama administration abandoned Americans who were easily within reach. While the lies used to cover up this disaster are easy to explain, the rationale behind the unconscionable stand down orders must still be determined. As the facts stand now, the likely explanations do not bode well for President Obama. The circumstances suggest the decision was made by a callous and desperate president struggling with a re-election campaign, a central plank of which was that al-Qaeda had been decimated and was “on the run” — not something affirmed by news of al-Qaeda operatives’ murder of our ambassador and military personnel. Or perhaps our commander-in-chief was too busy being our campaigner-in-chief and simply didn’t care about the carnage unfolding on his watch, which he declined to prevent. In any case, it is incumbent on the Obama administration to provide a rationale for its disastrous decision. As persistent Americans have shown, the investigation will not cease until that occurs.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/blow-by-blow-how-obama-hillary-left-americans-to-die/
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don't let the facts get in the way of your repub cryfest :D :D :D
1. F-16s could have been sent to Benghazi
Part of the prevailing theory surrounding the events the night of the Benghazi attacks is that the Obama administration did not do enough militarily to respond to the crisis. Gregory Hicks — a Foreign Service Officer and the former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya — claimed during his pre-hearing testimony that fighter jets could have been flown over Benghazi, preventing the second wave of the attack from occurring.
Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) questioned that statement, asking Hicks whether he disagreed with Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Gen Martin Dempsey’s assessment that no air assets were in range the night of the attack. Hicks didn’t disagree, saying he was “speaking from [his] perspective” and what “veteran Libyan revolutionaries” told him, rather than Pentagon assessments.
2. Hillary Clinton signed cables denying additional security to Benghazi
House Republicans came to the conclusion in their interim report on Benghazi that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied to them about what she knew and when during her testimony this January. This includes her statement that at no time was she aware of requests for additional security at the diplomatic facility in Benghazi prior to the attack.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) used her time to take issue with this claim, asking all three witnesses about standard protocol for cables leaving the State Department. All three agreed with Maloney, that the Secretary of State’s name is placed at the bottom of all outgoing cables and telegrams from Foggy Bottom, whether the Secretary has viewed them or not, shooting down the GOP claim.
3. A Special Forces Team that could have saved lives was told to stand down
One of the most shocking reveals in the lead-up to today’s hearing was that a team of Special Forces in Tripoli were told not to deploy to Benghazi during the attack. That decision has led to an uproar on the right, including claims of dereliction of duty towards Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey for not taking actions that could have saved lives.
During questioning, Hicks confirmed that the team was ready to be deployed — not to join the fighting at the CIA annex — but “to secure the airport for the withdrawal of our personnel from Benghazi after the mortar attack.” Hicks also confirmed that it was the second such team to be readied for deployment, with the first having proceeded to Benghazi earlier. Despite the second team not deploying, the staff was all evacuated first to Tripoli, then to Germany, within 18 hours of the attack taking place.
4. The State Department’s Accountability Review Board isn’t legitimate
Republicans have been attacking the State Department’s official in-house review of the shortcomings seen before, during, and after the assault in Benghazi. That criticism prompted House Republicans to write their own report. When asked point blank about the recommendations of the Board, however, the witnesses didn’t cooperate with the GOP narrative. “Absolutely,” Eric Nordstrom, the Regional Security Officer for Libya prior to the assault in Benghazi, answered when asked if he believes implementing the recommendations would improve security. “I had an opportunity to review that along with other two committee reports. I think taken altogether, they’re fairly comprehensive and reasonable.” Hicks, when questioned, said that while he had some issues with the process by which the Board gathered its information, he demurred on criticizing the report itself.
again, the facts aren't your friend :D :D :D
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everything this guy said Above is factual....100% factual..
During the bush years there were 50+ embassy attacks with 3 Amerians being killed...and zero outrage from Fox news.. whats the difference.
you see...i know you like to gloss over the facts and disqualify it by saying "its a comedian saying it" so hopefully you dont have to comment on it...but if its 12 oclock....and a comedian says "hey guys its 12 oclock"...is he wrong?
The fact that the media is biased is irrelevant. The fact that Bush fucked up to is irrelevant. Their were major fuckups from Obama's underlings on this one and the man should be cleaning house instead of cheerleading.
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Didn't every one of these people who testified yesterday just repeat what they had said at least a couple of times before
Is there anything new ?
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Didn't every one of these people who testified yesterday just repeat what they had said at least a couple of times before
Is there anything new ?
nothing new here to see,move along :D :D
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nothing new here to see,move along :D :D
well Issa said he learned nothing new so maybe after they get tired of trying to make hay out of this they can have more hearings on Solyndra, Fast and Furious and the White House Christmas tree and then Issa can say yet again that he learned nothing new
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nothing new here to see,move along :D :D
That's for sure.
After the last 4 or so years, I think we've seen all the liberal hypocrisy, stupidity, idiocy, and douchebaggery they can offer.
Give your Obama pic an 'xtra special kiss' tonight.
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That's for sure.
After the last 4 or so years, I think we've seen all the liberal hypocrisy, stupidity, idiocy, and douchebaggery they can offer.
Give your Obama pic an 'xtra special kiss' tonight.
find another big story to latch to :D :D :D :D or better yet just win next time :D :D :D
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find another big story to latch to :D :D :D :D or better yet just win next time :D :D :D
That's for sure. We need a smart 3rd party Independent / maybe Libertarian candidate to get some real traction and actually win a fucking election.
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what a joke.
Fox and Friends led off their lead stories with Cleveland, immigration and Dolly Parton in their studio - nary a word about the fizzled out testimonies till later into the hour.
and then only in passing.
didn't live up to the hype.
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Didn't every one of these people who testified yesterday just repeat what they had said at least a couple of times before
Is there anything new ?
anything new? yes.
it embarrassed Fox News again. all the hype leading up to the big day.
then nothing.
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anything new? yes.
it embarrassed Fox News again. all the hype leading up to the big day.
then nothing.
fox news,the glen beck of news :D
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http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/05/exclusive-benghazi-talking-points-underwent-12-revisions-scrubbed-of-terror-references
more lies from Obama and Hillary - go figure - two terrorists in their own right
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ABC NEWS: Benghazi Talking Points Were 'Dramatically Edited' By The Obama Administration
Brett LoGiurato|13 minutes ago|63|
The State Department explicitly removed all references to terrorism and extremist groups from the original talking points on last September's terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, according to a report Friday from ABC News' Jon Karl.
Karl reports that there were 12 different versions of the talking points before they were given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice as she appeared on five Sunday talk shows in the days after the attack and largely blamed it on a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video.
The editing process on the talking points had input from the State Department, which appears to contradict earlier proclamations from the White House suggesting that the talking points were produced almost entirely by the CIA.
According to Karl, the early drafts of the talking points included references to "Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida" who "participated in the attacks," as well as CIA warnings about threats in the months prior to the attack.
After State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland expressed concern about those portions and others, small changes were made — which weren't good enough for the Department.
"These changes don’t resolve all of my issues or those of my buildings leadership," she wrote.
After an interagency meeting at the White House on Saturday, the CIA produced the final version of the talking points, which did not include any references to the terrorist groups and previous security warnings.
On Wednesday, the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks gained new momentum with a high-profile Congressional hearing in which three State Department "whistleblowers" offered testimony.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified in January that she didn't have any input in the drafting of the talking points.
"I wasn’t involved in the talking points process," she said. "As I understand it, as I’ve been told, it was a typical interagency process where staff, including from the State Department, all participated, to try to come up with whatever was going to be made publicly available, and it was an intelligence product."
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said on "Morning Joe" Thursday that there was a "glaring problem" with State Department emails in the aftermath of the attacks. He said he couldn't go into further detail, and it's unclear if it's related to the ABC report.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/benghazi-talking-points-terror-cover-up-obama-administration-state-dept-2013-5#ixzz2StWVPeGw
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The Benghazi Scandal Grows (Long article)
TWS ^ | May 20, 2013 | Stephen Hayes
Posted on Friday, May 10, 2013 9:01:13 AM by Kaslin
CIA director David Petraeus was surprised when he read the freshly rewritten talking points an aide had emailed him in the early afternoon of Saturday, September 15. One day earlier, analysts with the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis had drafted a set of unclassified talking points policymakers could use to discuss the attacks in Benghazi, Libya. But this new version—produced with input from senior Obama administration policymakers—was a shadow of the original.
The original CIA talking points had been blunt: The assault on U.S. facilities in Benghazi was a terrorist attack conducted by a large group of Islamic extremists, including some with ties to al Qaeda.
These were strong claims. The CIA usually qualifies its assessments, providing policymakers a sense of whether the conclusions of its analysis are offered with “high confidence,” “moderate confidence,” or “low confidence.” That first draft signaled confidence, even certainty: “We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.”
There was good reason for this conviction. Within 24 hours of the attack, the U.S. government had intercepted communications between two al Qaeda-linked terrorists discussing the attacks in Benghazi. One of the jihadists, a member of Ansar al Sharia, reported to the other that he had participated in the assault on the U.S. diplomatic post. Solid evidence. And there was more. Later that same day, the CIA station chief in Libya had sent a memo back to Washington, reporting that eyewitnesses to the attack said the participants were known jihadists, with ties to al Qaeda.
Before circulating the talking points to administration policymakers in the early evening of Friday, September 14, CIA officials changed “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda” to simply “Islamic extremists.” But elsewhere, they added new contextual references to radical Islamists. They noted that initial press reports pointed to Ansar al Sharia involvement and added a bullet point highlighting the fact that the agency had warned about another potential attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in the region. “On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy.” All told, the draft of the CIA talking points that was sent to top Obama administration officials that Friday evening included more than a half-dozen references to the enemy—al Qaeda, Ansar al Sharia, jihadists, Islamic extremists, and so on.
The version Petraeus received in his inbox Saturday, however, had none. The only remaining allusion to the bad guys noted that “extremists” might have participated in “violent demonstrations.”
In an email at 2:44 p.m. to Chip Walter, head of the CIA’s legislative affairs office, Petraeus expressed frustration at the new, scrubbed talking points, noting that they had been stripped of much of the content his agency had provided. Petraeus noted with evident disappointment that the policymakers had even taken out the line about the CIA’s warning on Cairo. The CIA director, long regarded as a team player, declined to pick a fight with the White House and seemed resigned to the propagation of the administration’s preferred narrative. The final decisions about what to tell the American people rest with the national security staff, he reminded Walter, and not with the CIA.
This candid, real-time assessment from then-CIA director Petraeus offers a glimpse of what many intelligence officials were saying privately as top Obama officials set aside the truth about Benghazi and spun a fanciful tale about a movie that never mattered and a demonstration that never happened.
“The YouTube video was a nonevent in Libya,” said Gregory Hicks, a 22-year veteran diplomat and deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli at the time of the attacks, in testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on May 8. “The only report that our mission made through every channel was that there had been an attack on a consulate . . . no protest.”
So how did Jay Carney, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and others come to sell the country a spurious narrative about a movie and a protest?
There are still more questions than answers. But one previously opaque aspect of the Obama administration’s efforts is becoming somewhat clearer. An email sent to Susan Rice following a key White House meeting where officials coordinated their public story lays out what happened in that meeting and offers more clues about who might have rewritten the talking points.
The CIA’s talking points, the ones that went out that Friday evening, were distributed via email to a group of top Obama administration officials. Forty-five minutes after receiving them, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland expressed concerns about their contents, particularly the likelihood that members of Congress would criticize the State Department for “not paying attention to Agency warnings.” CIA officials responded with a new draft, stripped of all references to Ansar al Sharia.
In an email a short time later, Nuland wrote that the changes did not “resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership.” She did not specify whom she meant by State Department “building leadership.” Ben Rhodes, a top Obama foreign policy and national security adviser, responded to the group, explaining that Nuland had raised valid concerns and advising that the issues would be resolved at a meeting of the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee the following morning. The Deputies Committee consists of high-ranking officials at the agencies with responsibility for national security—including State, Defense, and the CIA—as well as senior White House national security staffers.
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what a joke.
Fox and Friends led off their lead stories with Cleveland, immigration and Dolly Parton in their studio - nary a word about the fizzled out testimonies till later into the hour.
and then only in passing.
didn't live up to the hype.
Mmm, Fox and Friends are on at what? 5-6am? It's more entertainment than news even though they do report some news? What's on after that and throughout the day into the night? If it wasn't for FOX this story wouldn't even be known because the Obama media surrogates are just as guilty as Obama and Clinton themselves.
If it was your kid that got killed would you just let it go? Or was this question too much for you?
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http://johnbatchelorshow.com/podcasts/2013/05/10/special-podcast
Hillary lied her ass off
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Mmm, Fox and Friends are on at what? 5-6am? It's more entertainment than news even though they do report some news? What's on after that and throughout the day into the night? If it wasn't for FOX this story wouldn't even be known because the Obama media surrogates are just as guilty as Obama and Clinton themselves.
If it was your kid that got killed would you just let it go? Or was this question too much for you?
if it were my kid I would know that he was working with the CIA and that goes along with the job.
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Listening to first testimony (Gregory Hicks), how can anyone side with Hilary on "what difference does it make"? I'm tempted to use the 'C' word >:(
Don't even go there!!! >:(
That is an affront to C's all over the world.
Hillary has neither the warmth nor the depth to be considered one of those.
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"This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing do to with.”
She said this at the funeral knowing full well it was all lies
The information that I have been given is that the video was actually made by the FBI
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Politically it's to badger Obama.
Non-politically it's about a massive failure of people in his administration to effectively handle the incident. It's about incompetence in key decision making roles and it doesn't appear to be limited to political appointees, but maybe even some career officials who should have been more competent (that last part is speculation and remains to be seen).
What I've been hearing about this is that it is NOT at all a case of incompetence, but rather a hit.
I'm not sure who first brought it up, ...I think it might have been Fury, who to his credit stated that Hillary is the fall guy, and that her resignation was falling on her sword for Obama (if memory serves me correctly)
If the info I have been given is correct, ...it was a direct hit on the Ambassador, by the very team the admin had running security in Benghazi. they wanted the ambassador dead, so he (who was the gunrunner to AlQ terrorists on behalf of the admin) wouldn't reveal that it was America's own proxy who attacked their embassy... so in order to cover up this collosal backfire... they sacrificed the Ambassador.
They had drones overhead, watching the whole thing as it went down, ....and just like Cheney on 911 who ordered fighter jets to stand down, ...they had a torture battalion nearby who ran their secret torture prison available, as well as others, ...but the order was to STAND DOWN... and let the attack continue. Then they released the FBI produced anti-muslim film in an effort to cover-up the attack. A film that did not cause the massive global Muslim indignation they were hoping to ignite, ...but did subsequently result in additional loss of life.
Just another CT... until proven fact, ...but a plausible one. We will see...
as AJ previously pointed out Nixon admin was impeached for secretly spying on his opponents, and getting their psych records and lying about it... and here we are 30 - 40 yrs later.... and presidential admins are spying on the entire nation, getting the psych profiles of the entire nation, and breaking laws that get Americans killed... lying about it, ...and it's just business as usual. We are indeed in interesting times. I no longer recognize America. :'(
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Bull fucking shit--- Its this kind of sick delusion that has all the Obama sychophants lying to themselves about having the moral high ground. You and the rest of the dick tugging Obama apologists are pathetic. As an American, if the Bengazzi situation doesn't outrage you, nothing will.
This treasonous coverup was orchestrated for the sole purpose of keeping Obama in power through the election. To manipulate the American public, no expense was spared. Here are some of the more outrageous aspects of the Bengazzi story:
1) The first amendment= thrown out the window. An American citizen had to go into hiding over a youtube video that NOBODY IN THE MIDDLE EAST EVER WATCHED IN THE FIRST PLACE. That same American citizen is now rotting in a Federal prison thanks to Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and Eric Holder.
2) Next, the Obama Administration wasted 10's of millions of dollars running an apology ad campaign for the video in hell holes like Pakistan to reassure Muslims that Americans are not Islamophobic. ::)
3) The Obama Administration credited the noble efforts of the Libyan people to save Ambassador Stevens by taking him to the hospital. In actuality, Stevens was sodomized with a Bayonet and taken to an Al Qaeda controlled hospital.
4) Two brave marines defied direct orders not to intervene and save the Ambassador-- they fought valiantly outnumbered and outgunned. What was their repayment? Hours upon hours of frenzied calls for backup went ignored while the President campaigned in Las Vegas and military personnel refused to provide any assistance on their behalf.
5) Susan Rice was paraded around the talk shows like a pack mule for two solid weeks blaming a non existent you tube video for the attacks-- And the slimy liberal media establishment followed suit and covered Obama's ass.
6) When whistle blowers tried to get the real story out, they were intimidated, threatened and harassed.
This is not political gamesmanship. This is something far more sinister and serious. There should be hell to pay. And God willing, there will be.
QFT!!!
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Wow!!!
All I can say is WOW!!! :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'(
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Exploiting what? A proven cover up with four murders? Should we just sweep it under the rug? What about the promises made by Obama and Clinton to the families? What about the families, you don't think they deserve answers?Holy shit, is commonsense lacking Thay much?
It's not a commonsense thing, ...it's a common decency thing, ...and it is lacking. It is what it always has been, ...a fight not against people, or principalities, ...but spiritual wickedness in high places.
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It's not a commonsense thing, ...it's a common decency thing, ...and it is lacking. It is what it always has been, ...a fight not against people, or principalities, ...but spiritual wickedness in high places.
or a CIA operation. in which case it will stay buried.
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The information that I have been given is that the video was actually made by the FBI
Another getbig.com exclusive.
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[ Invalid YouTube link ]
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http://www.ijreview.com/2013/05/52231-the-benghazi-cover-up-video
:o :o
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/16/obama-embassy-security_n_3286963.html
Obama keeps fucking lying!
State Dept said funding was not the issue in sworn testimony.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/16/obama-embassy-security_n_3286963.html
Obama keeps fucking lying!
State Dept said funding was not the issue in sworn testimony.
33, at this point, please, why are you still bitching?
your goal isn't impeachment - you said today that obama won't be impeached.
mccain, collins, graham, they all say impeachment off table. even bachman scared to say it. she says "some of the people I talk to say..."
SO really, you don't have a goal here, other than "embarass obama", which is petty and stupid. get him out of office thru impeachment, or STFU and live with his reckless abandon for the law. Anything in the middle is d*ckless and indecisive.
Agreed?
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http://www.ijreview.com/2013/05/52231-the-benghazi-cover-up-video
:o :o
This lays out the deliberate pattern of lying pretty well.
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Redacted truth, subjunctive outrage
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: May 16
Note to GOP re Benghazi: Stop calling it Watergate, Iran-contra, bigger than both, etc. First, it might well be, but we don’t know. History will judge. Second, overhyping will only diminish the importance of the scandal if it doesn’t meet presidency-breaking standards. Third, focusing on the political effects simply plays into the hands of Democrats desperately claiming that this is nothing but partisan politics.
Let the facts speak for themselves. They are damning enough. Let Gregory Hicks, the honorable, apolitical second-in-command that night in Libya, movingly and grippingly demolish the president’s Benghazi mantra that “what I have always tried to do is just get all the facts” and “every piece of information that we got, as we got it, we laid it out for the American people.”
On the contrary. Far from assiduously gathering and releasing information, the administration was assiduously trying to control and suppress it.
Just hours into the Benghazi assault, Hicks reports, by phone to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself, on the attack with absolutely no mention of any demonstration or video, later to become the essence of the Susan Rice talking points that left him “stunned” and “embarrassed.” “My jaw dropped,” he testified last week to Congress.
But Hicks is then ordered not to meet with an investigative congressional delegation — the first time in his 22-year career he had been so ordered. And when he speaks with them nonetheless, he gets a furious call from Clinton’s top aide for not having a State Department lawyer (and informant) present. His questions about the Rice TV statements are met with a stone-cold response, sending the message — don’t go there. He then finds himself demoted.
Get the facts and get them out? It wasn’t just Hicks. Within 24 hours, the CIA station chief in Libya cabled that it was a terrorist attack and not a spontaneous mob. On Day Two, the acting assistant secretary of state for the Near East wrote an e-mail saying the attack was carried out by an al-Qaeda affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia.
What were the American people fed? Four days and 12 drafts later, a fiction about a demonstration that never was, provoked by a video that no one saw (Hicks: “a non-event in Libya”), about a movie that was never made.
The original CIA draft included four paragraphs on the involvement of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists and on the dangerous security situation in Benghazi. These paragraphs were stricken after strenuous State Department objections mediated by the White House. All that was left was the fable of the spontaneous demonstration.
That’s not an accretion of truth. That’s a subtraction of truth.
And why? Let the deputy national security adviser’s e-mail to the parties explain: “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities” — fancy bureaucratese for “interests of the government agencies involved.” (He then added — “particularly the investigation.” But the FBI, which was conducting the investigation, had no significant objections. That excuse was simply bogus.)
Note that he didn’t say the talking points should reflect the truth — only the political interests, the required political cover, of all involved. And the overriding political interest was the need to protect the president’s campaign claim, his main foreign policy plank, that al-Qaeda was vanquished and the tide of war receding.
But then things got worse — the coverup needed its own coverup. On Nov. 28, press secretary Jay Carney told the media that State and the White House edited nothing but a single trivial word. When the e-mail trail later revealed this to be false, Carney doubled down. Last Friday, he repeated that the CIA itself made the edits after the normal input from various agencies.
That was a bridge too far for even the heretofore supine mainstream media. The CIA may have typed the final edits. But the orders came from on high. You cannot tell a room full of journalists that when your editor tells you to strike four paragraphs from your text — and you do — there were no edits because you are the one who turned in the final copy.
The Clintonian wordplay doesn’t stop with Benghazi. Four days after the IRS announced that it discriminated against conservative organizations, Carney said repeatedly in his daily briefing that, if true, the president would be outraged.
If? By then, the IRS had not only admitted the grievous misconduct but apologized for it — and the president was speaking in the conditional.
This could be the first case in presidential history of subjunctive outrage. (It turned into ostensibly real outrage upon later release of the Inspector Generalreport.) Add that to the conditional truths — ever changing, ever fading — of Benghazi, and you have a major credibility crisis.
Note to the White House: Try the truth. It’s easier to memorize.
Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Read more about this issue: Kathleen Parker: Hillary Clinton and the ghosts of Benghazi Richard Cohen: Symptoms of Benghazi Syndrome Eugene Robinson: A witch hunt on Benghazi Mark A. Thiessen: A Benghazi bombshell Michael Gerson: Incompetence, not criminality, in Benghazi investigation
© The Washington Post Company
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Obama's Emptiest Benghazi Talking Point
Townhall.com ^ | May 17, 2013 | Michelle Malkin
Posted on Friday, May 17, 2013 7:45:03 AM by Kaslin
On Sept. 12, 2012, President Barack Obama vowed to "bring to justice" the perpetrators of the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya. On Oct. 26, 2012, Obama said his "biggest priority" was bringing the "folks" in Libya responsible for murdering four Americans to "justice." Tick, tock, tick, tock.
While White House press secretary Jay Carney sneers at the GOP's "obsession" with what went wrong at the besieged Libyan consulate, Obama continues to ply his emptiest talking point. On May 13, 2013, more than eight months after the bloody disaster, Obama snippily reminded reporters that he had told us all back in September that "we would find out what happened, we would make sure that it did not happen again, and we would make sure that we held accountable those who had perpetrated this terrible crime."
Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Justice delayed is justice denied.
A little more "obsession" from this administration with hunting down the jihadist killers would be a good thing. How about a little more anger directed at the perpetrators and a little less rage aimed at the conservative press? Nah. Team Obama seems more singularly focused on blaming its opponents, smearing whistleblowers and deriding those who are trying to hold the president to his words, words, words.
Perhaps with their newfound skepticism toward the lying liars of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the former lapdogs of the White House press corps will start asking questions like this: Where the hell is Sufyan Ben Qumu a.k.a. Abu Sufian bin Qumu?
Qumu, a suspected Libyan Islamic Fighting Group militant with ties to the financiers of the 9/11/01 attacks, was held at Guantanamo Bay for six years. The Bush administration foolishly handed him over to the Gadhafi regime on the promise that he would remain imprisoned. In 2010, Qumu was granted amnesty and released.
Contrary to the delusions of the International Gitmo Bleeding Hearts Fan Club, the supposedly poor and oppressed Qumu did not content himself with writing poetry or farming potatoes. A week after the 9/11/12 attack, the Ansar al-Sharia leader was named a possible chief plotter in the deadly terrorist assault on our consulate personnel, staff and private security contractors in Benghazi. In April, international media outlets reported widely that Qumu had survived an assassination bid.
Two weeks ago, the FBI finally got around to publicizing photos of three individuals at the Benghazi murder scene who are wanted for questioning. Congressional and intelligence sources have said the probe has moved at a snail's pace. There's been a "near total lack of progress," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said in December.
It's all par for this administration's foot-dragging course. Remember: The FBI conducted a drive-by investigation last fall, flying in and out of Libya after a paltry 12 hours on the ground. What difference did the phony YouTube narrative plied by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and President Obama make? As former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, Greg Hicks testified last week that the damage done was "immeasurable" because it delayed the FBI probe. Classified documents were left unsecured at the compound. Critical time and evidence were squandered.
As Hicks explained, the YouTube fable publicly contradicted Libyan President Mohammed Magariaf, who had immediately reported after the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack that "this was an attack by Islamic extremists." The nonsense YouTube talking points "affected cooperation with the Libyans," Hicks said. "I firmly believe that the reason it took us so long to get the FBI to Benghazi is because of those Sunday talk shows." Meanwhile, the Washington Free Beacon's Bill Gertz reports, Qumu's Ansar al-Sharia goons "continue to operate freely" in Benghazi and spread jihadist ideology.
Instead of keeping as many terror operatives as possible off the streets and out of commission, the Obama administration is once again vowing to shut down Guantanamo Bay. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose former law firm Covington and Burling represented 18 Gitmo detainees demanding freedom, announced "a renewed effort to close Guantanamo" this week. This despite the chilling disclosure by the office of the director of national intelligence that 27.9 percent of the 599 former detainees released from Guantanamo were either confirmed or suspected of later engaging in jihadist attacks. That's a "2.9 percent rise over a 25 percent aggregate recidivism rate reported by the intelligence czar's office in December 2010," according to Reuters.
Closing Gitmo, you should note, just happens to be the top policy goal of the left-wing Center for Constitutional Rights. CCR is the U.S. group of jihadi-sympathizing lawyers who helped spring none other than Benghazi terror plotter Abu Sufian bin Qumu from Gitmo.
Social justice for Qumu and the Gitmo Goon Squad. No justice for the Benghazi Four. When it comes to Obama's vow to hold the killers accountable, there is no there there.
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What About the Video?
ADVANCE ARTICLE From our May 27, 2013 Issue.
Stephen F. Hayes
May 27, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 35
So, what about the video? The White House last week released nearly 100 pages of emails detailing some of the discussions within the Obama administration that resulted in major revisions to talking points about the Benghazi attacks drafted by the Central Intelligence Agency.
From the beginning, there have been two big questions about the administration’s deceptive spin on Benghazi: How were the talking points whittled down to virtually nothing from the CIA’s original draft? And how did a previously obscure YouTube video gain such prominence in the administration’s explanation of what happened in Benghazi?
The emails fill in at least some of the details about the talking points. They also leave in ruins administration claims that White House and State Department officials were mere bystanders in the process. But how, exactly, the video became so prominent in the administration’s public rhetoric remains something of a mystery.
The new documents disprove claims by Obama spokesman Jay Carney, Hillary Clinton, and others that the White House and State Department had virtually nothing to do with rewriting the talking points. Carney maintained that officials from State and the White House were responsible for a “single adjustment” to the language. Clinton insisted that the intelligence community was the “principal decider” of what would be said. But the emails make clear that top White House and State officials played key roles in reshaping the CIA’s initial draft.
“The State Department had major reservations with much or most of the document,” wrote a CIA official from the Office of Public Affairs, at 9:15 p.m. on September 14. “We revised the document with their concerns in mind.”
An official with the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis, where the talking points originated, signed off on the changes but warned that members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) wouldn’t be pleased. “They are fine with me. But, pretty sure HPSCI won’t like them. :-)”
The emails make clear that many of the deliberations about changing the talking points—phone calls, teleconferences, and discussions—were not recorded. But a picture nonetheless emerges of officials keenly interested to avoid blame, protect their bureaucracies, and settle on a message that all could live with.
At the end of a chain of emails in the early evening of September 14 regarding the “concerns” of State Department “leadership,” Ben Rhodes, a top adviser to Obama on national security, reassures the group that all concerns would get a hearing. “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation,” he wrote. Rhodes worried about “wrong information” coming from briefings provided to Congress and argued “we need to have the capability to correct the record, as there are significant policy and messaging ramifications that would flow from a hardened misimpression.”
Rhodes doesn’t specify the “wrong information” that concerns him or what “messaging” problems the president might face. But in the days preceding the email members of both parties had begun to challenge administration claims that the attacks were the result of a mob gone wild. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had told reporters that the government had “evidence” the attacks were “pre-planned.” Adam Smith, a Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the same thing. Following an intelligence committee briefing, Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, said: “This was a coordinated attack, more of a commando-style event.”
Rhodes ends his email by advising recipients that the issues would be addressed during a Deputies Committee meeting the following day, one of several times the decisionmaking process appears to have gone offline.
That same evening, Jake Sullivan, the deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning at the State Department, emails Victoria Nuland, the department spokesman, to inform her of conversations he’s had with Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House. “I spoke with Tommy,” he wrote at 9:25 p.m., September 14. “We’ll work through this in the morning and get comments back.” In another, seven minutes later: “Talked to Tommy. We can make edits.” Another round of substantive edits took place during or after the Deputies Committee meeting the following morning.
Such exchanges between a top official at State and his counterpart at the White House belie claims from Carney and others that substantive revisions to the talking points came only from the intelligence community.
So, too, does an email from CIA director David Petraeus to Chip Walter, on the legislative affairs staff at the agency, after Petraeus was provided a final draft of the talking points that had been through the interagency scrubbing. “No mention of the Cairo cable, either?” he wrote. “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this, then.” Petraeus’s use of the word “either,” suggests he disliked not just the omission of Cairo but the removal of something else as well.
The Cairo reference is important for another reason. It is the first step on a long, circuitous journey to understanding why the CIA initially reported that the Benghazi attacks had been “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo” and how the Obama administration came to depend on that phrase in selling its narrative about a YouTube video.
There was an intercepted communication between two al Qaeda-linked terrorists, one of whom participated in the Benghazi attack. According to sources familiar with the communication, a jihadist in Libya, believed to be a member of Ansar al Sharia (AAS), reported to a more senior operative about his participation in the Benghazi attack. The AAS member mentioned having seen the Cairo protests earlier in the day before joining the attack on the diplomatic facility in Benghazi. (There is disagreement among analysts whether the jihadist joined the Benghazi attacks because he had seen the protests in Cairo or simply after he had seen them.)
The intelligence community knew about the communication within 24 hours of the Benghazi attack. It would serve as the basis for two claims in the initial draft of the CIA talking points—“spontaneously inspired” and “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda.” The “spontaneous” language, which would prove dubious, survived the scrubbing process and was in the final talking points. The “ties to al Qaeda” language, which would prove true, was stricken.
That connection to Cairo, however tenuous, initially suited the purposes of both the CIA and the Obama administration. The CIA had warned about the possibility of protests in Cairo. An early version of the talking points included this bullet point: “On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the Embassy Cairo and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy.”
You can see the bureaucratic logic. It was all about avoiding blame: We didn’t specifically warn about attacks on 9/11/12 in Benghazi, but we warned about possible attacks at an embassy in the region. And by definition a spontaneous attack could not have been prevented.
The Cairo cable did not survive the interagency editing process. But the claim that Benghazi had been “spontaneously inspired” by the protests in Cairo would prove very useful for the Obama administration.
Jihadists did, in fact, demonstrate outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo on September 11, 2012. It took no great skill to predict this, as they had announced their intention to do so on Facebook in the days before the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. As Thomas Joscelyn has reported, Mohammed al Zawahiri, the brother of al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, helped plan the protest. Numerous well-known al Qaeda sympathizers were involved. They raised a black al Qaeda flag in place of the American flag and chanted, “Obama, Obama, we are all Osama.” An obscure YouTube video mocking the Prophet Muhammad that had aired on Egyptian television days earlier was the pretext for the demonstration. It was, in the words of one U.S. intelligence official, “a classic information operation.”
And it worked. The agency’s attempts at CYA had given Obama officials an opening, and they quickly took it. On these thin strands, the Obama administration built its explanation for Benghazi. There had been a demonstration in Cairo. The leaders of that protest used a YouTube video to incite a mob. A Benghazi attacker had seen the Cairo protest. He later participated in the attack in Benghazi.
A quadruple bank shot. And yet within days this previously obscure film became a central component of the Obama administration’s messaging on the Benghazi attacks. The Obama administration moved quickly to elevate the importance of the video. An attack that evolved from what the president would call “natural protests” by a mob over a video was a much better fit with the president’s claim that “al Qaeda is on a path to defeat” than assaults planned by al Qaeda-linked jihadists on multiple U.S. diplomatic facilities on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.
Hillary Clinton mentioned it in her remarks at the ceremony to receive the caskets of the four dead Americans on September 14, regretting the violence “over an awful Internet video we had nothing to do with.” According to Charles Woods, the father of one of the officials killed in the attack, former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, Clinton told him at the same ceremony that the U.S. government would make sure the filmmaker was “arrested and prosecuted.” Pat Smith, the mother of communications specialist Sean Smith, reported that Clinton told her the same thing, “nose to nose.”
Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., spoke for the administration on multiple television talk shows on Sunday, September 16, delivering variations on the theme that Benghazi was “a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video,” as she told Jake Tapper, then at ABC. “Our understanding and our belief based on the information we have is it was the video that caused the unrest in Cairo, and the video and the unrest in Cairo . . . that precipitated some of the unrest in Benghazi and elsewhere,” said Jay Carney on September 18.
Asked about Benghazi on September 20, President Obama referred to “natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video [and] were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests.” It was one of several times he would cite the video.
Despite the centrality of the YouTube video to the administration’s public discussion of Benghazi, it goes virtually unmentioned in the nearly 100 pages of emails between the nation’s top intelligence and Obama administration officials as they reshaped the talking points provided by the CIA. The film trailer is included as part of a list on the first page of the documents and again at the very end, in the subject line about a meeting of high-ranking officials on Saturday morning: “SVTS [Secure Video Teleconferencing System] on Movie Protests/Violence.”
As the top U.S. officials discussed what to include in the talking points that would shape their case to the country on the attacks in Benghazi, the video was absent. Whose idea was it to make it the centerpiece? The Obama administration still has a lot of explaining to do.
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
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Source URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/what-about-video_724696.html
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Via Breitbart
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SHOCKINGLY SAD NEWS...
Yesterday we received word that the National UDT SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, FL will be withdrawing their participation from the 2nd Annual Aaron Vaughn Memorial Frogman Swim.
100% of the proceeds from this extreme open-water ocean swim go to the non-profit foundation Aaron's sister started in his honor last fall...after a year of praying for God to show her the best way to honor her brother's legacy. www.operation300.com
Since the people who actually run the museum are honorable, wonderful patriots, one can only imagine that pressure came from somewhere above the local level...from someone Billy & I have clearly insulted by asking simple questions...questions our families deserve answers to.
This is a disgrace.
Please take a moment to look at the Operation 300 website so you can see for yourself how absolutely NON-POLITICAL and non-involved with our current mission for truth this foundation is. Someone, with a wounded ego, has decided this camp is of no value. What a shame...
By The Way, our son's name is on this very wall. Aaron spent many days before becoming a SEAL wandering these premises, dreaming of the day he would get his chance to join the men of legend whose artifacts fill every crevice. Now they shun him. What a kick in the gut.
I am literally BEGGING you to share this with the world. ~Karen Vaughn.
WHAT A FUCKING COINCIDENCE SINCE THE PARENTS SPOKE OUT LAST WEEK.
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It's Time To Discuss The Secret CIA Operation At The Heart Of The Benghazi Scandal
Michael Kelley and Geoffrey Ingersoll|24 minutes ago|935|5
The Broadwell Revelation Reminds Us How The CIA Annex In Benghazi Was Exposed
In eight months since an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi left four Americans dead, a Republican-led investigation has focused on potential missteps by the White House — and come away with nothing significant.
There has been little attention given, however, to covert actions by the Central Intelligence Agency that were partially uncovered during the September 11, 2012 attack.
That may be changing.
CNN's Jake Tapper argued this week that we should give more scrutiny to the CIA's presence in the Libyan port city.
Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Va.) said the same, according to CNN: "There are questions that must be asked of the CIA and this must be done in a public way."
Among the questions are whether CIA missteps contributed to the security failure in Benghazi and, more importantly, whether the Agency's Benghazi operation had anything to do with reported heavy weapons shipments from the local port to Syrian rebels.
In short, the CIA is the most intriguing thing about Benghazi. Here's what we know:
The attack
At about 9:40 p.m. local time on Sept. 11, a mob of Libyans attacked a building housing U.S. State Department personnel. At 10:20 p.m. Americans arrived from a CIA annex located 1.2 miles away, to help the besieged Americans. At 11:15 p.m. they fled with survivors back to the secret outpost.
Armed Libyans followed them and attacked the annex with rockets and small arms from around midnight to 1:00 a.m., when there was a lull in the fighting.
Glen Doherty, a former Navy SEAL and CIA security contractor, was with a team of Joint Special Operations Command military operators and CIA agents in Tripoli at the time of the attack. When they received word of the assault on the mission, Doherty and six others bribed the pilots of small jet with $30,000 cash for a ride to Benghazi.
At about 5:15 a.m., right after Doherty's group arrived, the attackers began shooting mortars at the annex, leading to the death of Doherty and fellow former Navy SEAL commando and CIA contractor Tyrone Woods.
At 6 a.m. Libyan forces from the military intelligence service arrived and subsequently took more than 30 Americans — only seven of which were from the State Department — to the Benghazi airport.
So the CIA's response to go to the annex saved American lives, but it also ended up exposing their covert presence.
And according to Paula Broadwell, the mistress of David Petraeus when he was CIA director, the CIA may have provided an impetus for the attack by holding prisoners at the annex: "Now I don't know if a lot of you heard this, but the CIA annex had taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner and they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get these prisoners back."
'At its heart a CIA operation'
In November the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. mission in Benghazi "was at its heart a CIA operation."
In January former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Congress that the CIA was leading a "concerted effort to try to track down and find and recover ... MANPADS [man-portable air defense systems]" looted from the stockpiles of toppled Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi.
The State Department "consulate" served as diplomatic cover for the previously hidden annex.
The top-secret presence and location of the CIA outpost was first acknowledged by Charlene Lamb, a top official in the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, during Congressional testimony in October.
Representatives Jason Chaffetz and Darrell Issa immediately called a point of order when Lamb showed a map locating the annex, and asked for the revelation to be stricken from the record.
“I totally object to the use of that photo,” Chaffetz. said. “I was told specifically while I was in Libya I could not and should not ever talk about what you’re showing here today.”
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-secret-cia-mission-in-benghazi-2013-5#ixzz2TYuz3H4m
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Weapons from Benghazi to Syria
Also in October we reported the connection between Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who died in the attack, and a reported September shipment of SA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles (i.e. MANPADS) and rocket-propelled grenades from Benghazi to Syria through southern Turkey.
That 400-ton shipment — "the largest consignment of weapons" yet for Syrian rebels — was organized by Abdelhakim Belhadj, who was the newly appointed head of the Tripoli Military Council.
In March 2011 Stevens, the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan rebels, worked directly with Belhadj while he headed the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
Stevens' last meeting on Sept. 11 was with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, and a source told Fox News that Stevens was in Benghazi "to negotiate a weapons transfer in an effort to get SA-7 missiles out of the hands of Libya-based extremists."
Syrian rebels subsequently began shooting down Syrian helicopters and fighter jets with SA-7s akin to those in Qaddafi's looted stock. (The interim Libyan government also sent money and fighters to Syria.)
What did the CIA know?
Collectively these details raised the question of what the CIA knew, given that Agency operatives in Libya were rounding up SA-7s, ostensibly to destroy them, while operatives in southern Turkey were funneling weapons to the rebels.
Ambassador Stevens certainly would have known if the new Libyan government was sending 400 tons of heavy weapons to Turkey from Benghazi's port.
Just like the CIA would know if those the weapons arrived in Turkey and began showing up in Syria.
Journalist Damien Spleeters created this sourced map, drawing info shared on social media such as YouTube, that gives an idea of the MANPADS presence in Syria.
We've added red tag noting the Turkish port, Iskenderun, where the massive SA-7 shipment docked. And this map of nearby Turkish highways shows that the heavy weapons could have been transported from the port to the Syrian city of Aleppo in three hours.
Damien Spleeters/The Trigger
Other intriguing details
This week Nancy Youssef of McClatchy reported that Ambassador Stevens reportedly twice turned down offers for additional security, despite specifically asking for more men in cables to the State Department.
Earlier this month Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kent.) told CNN: “I’ve actually always suspected that, although I have no evidence, that maybe we were facilitating arms leaving Libya going through Turkey into Syria. ... Were they trying to obscure that there was an arms operation going on at the CIA annex? I’m not sure exactly what was going on, but I think questions ought to be asked and answered."
So now that all of the Benghazi emails have been published, and the State Department's role during and after the attack have been probed ad nauseam, it's time for someone to explain what the covert CIA operation in Benghazi was all about.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-secret-cia-mission-in-benghazi-2013-5#ixzz2TYwLmfV8
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So what, 33? We gotta do that kinda shit to remain #1. Please tell us you're not all butthurt that the US is doing shady shit to keep us on top?
these are both OLD stories - Beck had them months ago, dude. Doesn't matter what they were doing there - they were american heroes and that's that.
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US smuggling weapons to Syrian rebels: The real Benghazi story
Thu, 2013-05-16 08:13 — editor
Daya Gamage - Asian Tribune US National Correspondent
Washington, D.C. 16 May (Asiantribune.com):
There is a 'side story' going on in the American media - both the electronic and print about the Islamist jihadists lethal attack on the American 'post' in Benghazi, Libya last September 11 which killed American ambassador Christopher Steven and three others; The emphasis and the debate is on why the event was twisted by the Obama administration to conceal a terrorist attack on eve of the presidential election. US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens killed in attack on 11 September 2012
With the killing of Osama bin Larden on May 2 last year the administration, which was approaching the re-election of Mr. Obama in November, wants to convince the American people that the al Qaeda was now annihilated for good.
When the Islamist jihadist group affiliated to al Qaeda lethally attacked the American 'post' in Benghazi the Obama administration twisted the events to convince that a anti-Islamic video produced by someone in California was the cause of the attack.
These days the highlights and debate is about why the 'talking points' were changed twelve times to give that different picture.
As Obama rightfully said a couple of days ago about this debate, mostly spearheaded by the Republicans, was a 'side show.'
The 'real show' is in fact buried. And the 'real show' is that the United States, Ambassador Steven playing a major role, was in the process of shipping arms to Syrian rebels to topple Basher el-Assad's regime.
It was on October 25 last year that FoxNews.com broke the story that a mysterious Libyan ship was reportedly carrying weapons and bound for Syrian rebels would have had some link to the September 11 terror attack on the U.S. 'post' in Benghazi.
Why do we use the term 'post' in this report? Because when changes were made to the Benghazi attack story by the Obama administration it changed from 'American Consulate' to 'American Post'. The reason: Benghazi operation was entirely a CIA operation.
Through shipping records, Fox News has confirmed that the Libyan-flagged vessel Al Entisar, which means "The Victory," was received in the Turkish port of Iskenderun -- 35 miles from the Syrian border -- on Sept. 6, just five days before Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American officers were killed during an extended assault by more than 100 Islamist militants.
On the night of Sept. 11, in what would become his last known public meeting, Stevens met with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, and escorted him out of the 'posts' front gate one hour before the assault began.
Although what was discussed at the meeting is not public, a source told Fox News that Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate a weapons transfer, an effort to get SA-7 missiles out of the hands of Libya-based extremists. And although the negotiation said to have taken place may have had nothing to do with the attack on the consulate later that night or the Libyan mystery ship, it could explain why Stevens was travelling in such a volatile region on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
When asked to comment, a State Department spokeswoman dismissed the idea, saying Stevens was there for diplomatic meetings, and to attend the opening of a cultural center.
According to an initial Sept. 14 report by the Times of London, Al Entisar was carrying 400 tons of cargo. Some of it was humanitarian, but also reportedly weapons, described by the report as the largest consignment of weapons headed for Syria's rebels on the frontlines.
The cargo reportedly included surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles, RPG's and Russian-designed shoulder-launched missiles known as MANPADS.
In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan opposition, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group—a group that has now disbanded, with some fighters reportedly participating in the attack that took Stevens' life.
In November 2011 The Telegraph reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council, "met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey" in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria.
The Internet Media reported at that time that Ambassador Stevens had only one person—Belhadj—between himself and the Benghazi man who brought heavy weapons to Syria.
The Asian Tribune has also found that the Internet Media further reported that if the new Libyan government was sending seasoned Islamic fighters and 400 tons of heavy weapons to Syria through a port in southern Turkey—a deal brokered by Stevens' primary Libyan contact during the Libyan revolution—then the governments of Turkey and the U.S. surely knew about it.
Furthermore there was a CIA post in Benghazi, located 1.2 miles from the U.S. consulate, used as "a base for, among other things, collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles" ... and that its security features "were more advanced than those at rented villa where Stevens died."
As noted earlier, the Obama administration has since described the American facility in Benghazi not as a 'Consulate' but as a 'Post'.
The U.S. Republican Senator Rand Paul, who is expected to run for his party presidential nomination in the year 2016, was the only American lawmaker who disclosed about this 'arms deal' which he connects to Ambassador Steven's brutal muder in the hands of the Islamist Jihadists.
In an interview aired on CNN May 9 evening, Sen. Paul said he hasn’t ruled out the possibility that last year’s attack unfolded as a result of a secret arms trade. The confusion in the immediate aftermath of the event — including unfounded admissions from America’s United Nations envoy Susan Rice that contradicted what is known today about the attack — could actually be a cover-up, the senator said.
The Obama administration sent its ambassador to UN Susan Rice on the following Sunday talk shows to say that the offending Islamic video was the cause of the attack in Benghazi.
“I’ve actually always suspected that, although I have no evidence, that maybe we were facilitating arms leaving Libya going through Turkey into Syria,” he said.
“Were they trying to obscure that there was an arms operation going on at the CIA annex?” Paul asked. “I’m not sure exactly what was going on, but I think questions ought to be asked and answered, and I’m a little curious when employees of the State Department are told by government officials they shouldn’t testify - before the Senate or House committees - and then they are sort of sequestered and kept away from testimony, so I think there may be more to this.”
This is not the first time either that Senator Paul raised questions about possible arms supplies under the CIA umbrella. During her testimony in the Senate in January, Rand Paul asked then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton whether the spy agency was sending weapons from Benghazi into other countries. Clinton replied that he would have to ask CIA officials about it.
Sen. Rand Paul said on Aaron Klein Radio in mid April: “First of all with regard to Benghazi, I think it’s important [to determine more about the apparent gun-running program] because it may have something to do with why the compound was attacked. If we were involved with shipping guns to Turkey, there was a report that a ship left from Libya towards Turkey and that there were arms on it in the week preceding this [attack]; there were reports that our ambassador was meeting with the Turkish attaché, so I think with regards to figuring out what happened at Benghazi, it’s very important to know whether or not the CIA annex had anything to do with facilitating guns being sent to Turkey and ultimately to Syria. With regard to arming the rebels, just this week in the armed services committee, General Dempsey, the [Chairman of the] Joint Chiefs of Staff said that we were no longer able to distinguish who the good guys were from the bad guys and that sounds pretty worrisome if we are actually arming people who in the end may be enemies of America…enemies of Israel… enemies maybe of the Christians who live within Syria...sending arms to a rebel force to that may include Al-Nusra and other radical jihadists.”
In the eighties, the Iran-Contra Arms Affair shook the Regan administration the way the Benghazi affair is developing to shake the foundation of the Obama administration.
Iran-contra affair, in U.S. history, secret arrangement in the 1980s to provide funds to the Nicaraguan contra rebels from profits gained by selling arms to Iran. The Iran-contra affair was the product of two separate initiatives during the administration of President Ronald Reagan. The first was a commitment to aid the contras who were conducting a guerrilla war against the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The second was to placate "moderates" within the Iranian government in order to secure the release of American hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon and to influence Iranian foreign policy in a pro-Western direction.
Despite the strong opposition of the Reagan administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress enacted legislation that prohibited the Defense Dept., the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or any other government agency from providing military aid to the contras from Dec., 1983, to Sept., 1985. The Reagan administration circumvented these limitations by using the National Security Council (NSC), which was not explicitly covered by the law, to supervise covert military aid to the contras. Under Robert McFarlane (1983–85) and John Poindexter (1985–86) the NSC raised private and foreign funds for the contras. This operation was directed by NSC staffer Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. McFarlane and North were also the central figures in the plan to secretly ship arms to Iran despite a U.S. trade and arms embargo.
In early Nov., 1986, the scandal broke when reports in Lebanese newspapers forced the Reagan administration to disclose the arms deals. Poindexter resigned before the end of the month; North was fired. Select congressional committees held joint hearings, and in Dec., 1986, Lawrence E. Walsh was named as special prosecutor to investigate the affair. Higher administration officials, particularly Reagan, Vice President Bush, and William J. Casey (former director of the CIA, who died in May, 1987), were implicated in some testimony, but the extent of their involvement remained unclear. North said he believed Reagan was largely aware of the secret arrangement, and the independent prosecutor's report (1994) said that Reagan and Bush had some knowledge of the affair or its cover-up. Reagan and Bush both claimed to have been uninformed about the details of the affair, and no evidence was found to link them to any crime. A presidential commission was critical of the NSC, while congressional hearings uncovered a web of official deception, mismanagement, and illegality.
A number of criminal convictions resulted, including those of McFarlane, North, and Poindexter, but North's and Poindexter's were vacated on appeal because of immunity agreements with the Senate concerning their testimony. Former State Dept. and CIA officials pleaded guilty in 1991 to withholding information about the contra aid from Congress, and Caspar Weinberger, defense secretary under Reagan, was charged (1992) with the same offense. In 1992 then-president Bush pardoned Weinberger and other officials who had been indicted or convicted for withholding information on or obstructing investigation of the affair.
Will the Benghazi Affair leads that far?
- Asian Tribune –
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33, at this point, please, why are you still bitching?
your goal isn't impeachment - you said today that obama won't be impeached.
mccain, collins, graham, they all say impeachment off table. even bachman scared to say it. she says "some of the people I talk to say..."
SO really, you don't have a goal here, other than "embarass obama", which is petty and stupid. get him out of office thru impeachment, or STFU and live with his reckless abandon for the law. Anything in the middle is d*ckless and indecisive.
Agreed?
Impeachment isn't going to happen and none of this is serious enough to justify it.
But, the ultimate goal should be to force Obama to clean house. Get rid of the bad apples, do it quickly - don't stall, and then move the fuck on.
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Impeachment isn't going to happen and none of this is serious enough to justify it.
But, the ultimate goal should be to force Obama to clean house. Get rid of the bad apples, do it quickly - don't stall, and then move the fuck on.
Obama is the bad apple ;)
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so.....is he impeached yet?
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Stand Down': U.S. Had Two Drones, AC-130 Gunship, and Targets Painted in Benghazi
by AWR Hawkins
27 Oct 2012
Reports indicate two drones and an AC-130 gunship were in the area when Benghazi was attacked, yet their resources were not used.
This runs completely against the current explanation coming out of the White House, which is that Obama did everything he could once he learned of the attack.
You'll remember that in the second presidential debate, Obama said that as "soon as I was aware the Benghazi consulate was being overrun, I was on the phone with my national security team." The not-so-subtle intimation is that Obama was stepping up to the protect the U.S. personnel who were in Libya. And in the wakes of their deaths, which weren't "optimal," we have been assured that stronger action wasn't taken stronger because those options weren't available.
Sec. of Defense Leon Panetta gave us another version this same excuse, saying: "The U.S. military did not get involved during the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi last month because officials did not have enough information about what was going on before the attack was over."
There are three huge problems with the excuses Obama and Panetta are making.
1. It is now known that the U.S. had two drones in the area -- both of which were filming the attacks, sending back feeds in real time, and at least one of the drone may have been armed.
2. Reports also indicate a Specter gunship, probably an AC-130, was in the area for backup. The gunship could have swooped in and not only leveled the playing field in the match between 50 attackers vs a handful of security personnel, it could have thrown the attack decisively in favor of the security personnel.
3. The security personnel in Benghazi had painted a laser mark on the attackers outside the consulate. This mark would have made possible a response by the drones or the AC-130 routine had they been allowed to zero in on it. The member of the security team who was on the roof of the consulate, spraying machine gun fire down on the attackers, continually asked for backup from the AC-130. It never came.
Obama says he was doing everything he could, and Panetta says we didn't react more strongly because we weren't sure what was going on. Yet we now know two drones were sending back video of the attack in real time, and at least one of those drones may have been armed. We also know a massive AC-130 gunship could have been used for backup as well, but it was not. And we know that security was begging for backup and even marking targets with lasers for the drones and/or gunship so they could make quick work of the attackers.
Yet Obama chose not to respond, and that's the bottom line.
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Stand Down': U.S. Had Two Drones, AC-130 Gunship, and Targets Painted in Benghazi
by AWR Hawkins
27 Oct 2012
Reports indicate two drones and an AC-130 gunship were in the area when Benghazi was attacked, yet their resources were not used.
This runs completely against the current explanation coming out of the White House, which is that Obama did everything he could once he learned of the attack.
You'll remember that in the second presidential debate, Obama said that as "soon as I was aware the Benghazi consulate was being overrun, I was on the phone with my national security team." The not-so-subtle intimation is that Obama was stepping up to the protect the U.S. personnel who were in Libya. And in the wakes of their deaths, which weren't "optimal," we have been assured that stronger action wasn't taken stronger because those options weren't available.
Sec. of Defense Leon Panetta gave us another version this same excuse, saying: "The U.S. military did not get involved during the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi last month because officials did not have enough information about what was going on before the attack was over."
There are three huge problems with the excuses Obama and Panetta are making.
1. It is now known that the U.S. had two drones in the area -- both of which were filming the attacks, sending back feeds in real time, and at least one of the drone may have been armed.
2. Reports also indicate a Specter gunship, probably an AC-130, was in the area for backup. The gunship could have swooped in and not only leveled the playing field in the match between 50 attackers vs a handful of security personnel, it could have thrown the attack decisively in favor of the security personnel.
3. The security personnel in Benghazi had painted a laser mark on the attackers outside the consulate. This mark would have made possible a response by the drones or the AC-130 routine had they been allowed to zero in on it. The member of the security team who was on the roof of the consulate, spraying machine gun fire down on the attackers, continually asked for backup from the AC-130. It never came.
Obama says he was doing everything he could, and Panetta says we didn't react more strongly because we weren't sure what was going on. Yet we now know two drones were sending back video of the attack in real time, and at least one of those drones may have been armed. We also know a massive AC-130 gunship could have been used for backup as well, but it was not. And we know that security was begging for backup and even marking targets with lasers for the drones and/or gunship so they could make quick work of the attackers.
Yet Obama chose not to respond, and that's the bottom line.
more lies,your post are so full of shit they are laughable
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Whatever - you can only deny the obvious for so long.
Obama went to bed that night not doing a damn thing on the anniversary of 9/11 while our people were dieing all to rest up for his next day trip to Vegas w Jay z and then lied about its cause thereafter for months on end.
FORWARD TO SLAVERY 95'S!
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/OPINION:
"What difference, at this point, does it make?"
— Hillary Rodham Clinton, in House testimony on Benghazi
"Well, I got a couple of thousand goddamn questions, you know. I want to speak to someone in charge."
— Roy Neary, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
Spoiler alert: The IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal — they go nowhere. In September, we'll all be looking back thinking, "Huh, that was a big waste of time." It will be — in fact, it already is.
Just when Benghazi has reached critical mass, the Obama administration, which has had only one scandal (Fast and Furious early in term 1, and that fizzled fast and furiously), suddenly has two more scandals? Coincidence, yes?
No. Not at all. They were dropped, on purpose, at a most convenient time, and they're already played out. Exactly according to plan.
The phone "scandal," in which the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed call logs from The Associated Press, ended before it started. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., called to the carpet by House investigators, testified last week that he had recused himself entirely from the matter. He didn't know a thing about the case, he said with a smirk. Not a thing. Done.
So, months from now, maybe they lop off the head of the man who orchestrated the records grab, Deputy Attorney General James Cole. But even that isn't assured. Justice is now making a case for why the clearly unconstitutional records grab was not unconstitutional; it'll be months before there's any closure. Will anyone care in August?
And the IRS "scandal," in which the federal tax-collecting agency apparently targeted tea party groups, also will fizzle. Already, the president — incensed over the mess, spitting mad! — has canned the acting commissioner, Steven Miller. Well, not really, his term ended June 8 anyway. At least the president demanded the head of the commissioner of the agency's tax-exempt and government entities division. Well, not really. Joseph Grant decided to "retire" June 3. Bring on the government pension and free health care.
Plus, the administration already has pinned the whole debacle on a few "rogue" IRS employees in the Cincinnati branch. You think anyone will find the president's fingerprints on orders demanding that the agency crack down on political opponents? Please. This is the Chicago mafia: They cover their tracks and they long ago filed off their fingerprints.
What's more, Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division in charge of evaluating charitable and other nonprofit organizations, rolled out the scandal herself at a conference of lawyers. The slumbering press corps didn't unearth the "scandal," Mrs. Lerner merely called a friend and planted the question concerning an upcoming inspector general's report. That's how the story broke.
But who cares: The president's taking action! Let's move on, folks, nothing to see here.
The whole ham-handed game play is comical. Just as shocking testimony emerged on the Benghazi scandal, the administration rolls out two scandals, with the targets just coincidentally — the media and right-wing conservatives. Absurd. But fairly brilliant. The self-absorbed media predictably swooned over its plight — this is the biggest scandal ever. And the right-wingers grew indignant, finally able to say "We told you so." Well played, Obama administration.
Even more: Neither scandal matters, certainly not now. The IRS mess stretches back years — reports say as long ago as 2009 — but Team Obama has already gotten what it wanted: The IRS, most likely at the direction of the White House, slowed down the growth of the tea party, changing the 2012 election immeasurably. The phone fiasco, over a published AP story no one even remembers, does not appear to lead anywhere, least of all back to the White House. So the DOJ guys know somebody at one phone number dialed somebody at another phone number? So what? Who cares?
While both "scandals" are all over but the shouting, the shouting will consume the summer. Into the dog days with both scandals we go. Meanwhile, the president is steadfastly moving on his agenda on guns, amnesty, Obamacare — and far away from Benghazi, dismissed as a political witch hunt.
Need proof? Last week, Mr. Obama took two questions from the press corps — one on the IRS mess, the other on the phone scandal. Success — Benghazi is gone, forgotten.
Meanwhile, no one even knows where the president was the night a U.S. ambassador was murdered, or why the U.S. military sent no help. No one knows who inserted into official talking points a false story that an anti-Islam video led to the massacre. And no one seems to care — least of all the White House.
"I don't remember what room the president was in on that night, and that's a largely irrelevant fact," top Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer said Sunday.
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton angrily spat: "What difference, at this point, does it make?"
And the president last week said simply: "There's no there there."
But be warned, White House: Bob Woodward, who knows a thing or two about scandals and cover-ups, isn't falling for the double head fake.
"If you read through all these emails," the Watergate reporter said, "you see that everyone in the government is saying, 'Oh, let's not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al Qaeda. Let's not tell the public that there were warnings.' I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts to the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, 'Oh, let's not tell this, let's not show this.'"
"I would not dismiss Benghazi."
Too bad, Bob. Washington's press corps already has.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/19/benghazi-is-the-only-scandal-that-matters/#ixzz2TpnS6kKf
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter
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well let's clear up your lies,the two 333386's in the area only had cameras on them so unless ypo wanted them to swoop down and buss around their heads they were not an option
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well let's clear up your lies,the two 333386's in the area only had cameras on them so unless ypo wanted them to swoop down and buss around their heads they were not an option
Remember douchebag - they did nothing whatsoever to even try to help those 40 people - they were left to die while obama went to bed resting up for his party w Jay z
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when is the stupid party going to realize they had no assets in the area,as they said the repubs have a comical view of the military
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when is the stupid party going to realize they had no assets in the area,as they said the repubs have a comical view of the military
Bullshit - at the time they were notified they had noidea how long the seige was going to last.
They did nothing but left those 40 people to die while that ghetto scumbag rat went to bed resting up for a party w Jay Z. Typical ghetto pimp behavior
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Bullshit - at the time they were notified they had noidea how long the seige was going to last.
They did nothing but left those 40 people to die while that ghetto scumbag rat went to bed resting up for a party w Jay Z. Typical ghetto pimp behavior
you just keep on living in fantasy land with the rest of the stupid party the far right nut jobs at their best
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you just keep on living in fantasy land with the rest of the stupid party the far right nut jobs at their best
How is it fantasy land? Hicks said he told Hillary instantly it was a terrorist attack and after that Hillary never called him back and that he could only get in touch w a the lybians who had later informed him of Stevens' death.
Additionally - remember the lie Obama told about the lybians trying to help Stevens? LIE!!! They took him to an alqueada run hospital where he was raped and sodomized.
There is all while that ghetto welfare crack head son of a whore went to bed resting up for a party w Jay Z on the Ann of 9/11
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Bombshell in the Benghazi e-mails: The CIA warned of impending jihadist attack
Special to WorldTribune.com
By Grace Vuoto
The White House recently released more than 100 pages of e-mails between the CIA, State Department and the White House regarding the now infamous talking points.
President Barack Obama insists “there is no there, there,” as he stated during a May 13 press conference. Yet, the opposite is true. There is a bombshell there.
Thousands of Egyptian protesters demonstrate outside U.S. embassy in Cairo on Sept. 11, 2012. /AP
The CIA had warned on Sept. 10, 2012, one day before the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, of the possibility of a jihadist attack on an American embassy.
We now know that on Sept. 15, 2012, when then-CIA Director David Petraeus read the final version of the talking points, he wrote in an e-mail: “No mention of the cable to Cairo, either? I’d just as soon not use this, then…NSS’s (National Security Staff) call to be sure…”
At that point, all references to the perpetrators of the Benghazi attack, Ansar al-Sharia, a Libyan Al Qaida affiliate, had been redacted. The cable to Cairo contained a warning that Al Qaida-linked jihadists might strike the American embassy there, according to The Weekly Standard.
As an earlier version of the talking points put it: “On September 10 we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the Embassy Cairo and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy.”
In other words, America’s intelligence community feared there was danger in Cairo even before the rally occurred the following day. On September 11, there was no “spontaneous demonstration” protesting an anti-Muslim video in Egypt (or in Benghazi for that matter), as the administration would later claim, especially by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice who misled the public Sept.16 on five Sunday talk shows.
Instead, there was a rally in Cairo organized by five well-known Al Qaida-linked jihadists who had previously been jailed for terrorist activity, according to an Oct. 26 report by Thomas Joscelyn in The Long War Journal. This rally was an Al Qaida love-fest. Flags floated in the crowd honoring Al Qaida and the crowd chanted: “Obama, Obama! We are all Osama!” The five senior jihadist organizers were simply using the anti-Muslim video to gin up even more outrage and anti-American sentiment. The video was merely an appendage in their greater quest to proclaim, loudly and boldly that “Al Qaida’s ideology lives,” according to the detailed report.
Thus, Mr. Petraeus expressed his dismay on Sept.15 that a key piece of information — the essential context — was omitted. Without this, the talking points were one giant mess.
Yet, if this key piece of information were indeed revealed, the Obama administration would be exposed as having lied about the receding Al Qaida threat around the world. They would also appear to be incompetent in preventing another attack on sovereign American soil, right after having been warned that it might occur.
It was precisely this that Mr. Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were determined to conceal amidst the heated and closely contested 2012 presidential campaign. If they could convince the American people that both the Cairo and Benghazi events were spontaneous, then they could not be accused of failing to prevent the violent outbreaks that occurred.
The truth is now simple, stark and a scathing indictment of the Obama administration: On Sept. 10, the CIA knew that Al Qaida-linked jihadists posed a threat; they were stirring animosity, possibly endangering the American embassy in Cairo.
The Obama administration did not heed the warning of the intelligence community, nor have the good sense to fortify defenses in a “high-risk” outpost such as the consulate in Benghazi. Hence, when jihadists struck in Libya and four Americans died, Mr. Obama and his entourage grasped immediately that if the public understood the correct sequence of events, the Obama team would be lampooned out of office.
Every part of this story reveals the glaring failures of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy: The pro-jihadist rally in Cairo exposed the president as having badly miscalculated from the start of his term. There, in the very place where on June 4, 2009, he had proclaimed “a new beginning” for America and the Muslim world, terrorists now spewed hatred on the United States and celebrated Osama bin Laden as their champion and hero. And they also continued to threaten imminent violence.
In addition, the emails and cables the intelligence community had sent, warning of danger to a U.S. embassy on Sept. 11, 2012 (even if it was that in Cairo) should have put every security team in every American outpost on high alert for a possible strike, with contingency plans in place to counterattack and rescue Americans who might be in harm’s way. By contrast, Mr. Obama’s staff was caught completely flat-footed when jihadists struck in Benghazi.
When terrorists attacked in Libya, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens called his second-in-command, Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks and said, “Greg, we are under attack.” Mr. Hicks, as he testified in a May 8 congressional hearing, then called Mrs. Clinton and relayed that the U.S. diplomatic mission was besieged. And somewhere, somehow, as the horror unfolded, in the middle of that fateful night, an evil order to “stand down” was issued. A military rescue would not even be attempted. For the dark secret had to be preserved at all costs. If Americans had to die, so be it. In other words, the plot to conceal Mr. Obama’s glaring failures was concocted.
Thus, Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty became four casualties in the glorious cause of the re-election of the very man whose entire foreign policy had just gone up in smoke.
Dr. Grace Vuoto is the Executive Director of the Edmund Burke Institute for American Renewal.
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The only good part about this story (and the same can be said about the IRS and AP stories) will be 333's tears just like on the day of the election
hey 333 - when exactly is the collapse of the nation going to happen. Remember the hundreds if not thousands of hours of your life you devoted to warning us about that nonsense?
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We are supposed to be all communist by now.
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We are supposed to be all communist by now.
Well we are a fascist state already by oba'as war on the press - which even liberals today are admitting to.
FORWARD!!!!
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Well we are a fascist state already by oba'as war on the press - which even liberals today are admitting to.
FORWARD!!!!
You must be so miserable being impacted and influenced by SPIN daily, hourly and every minute.
Fascist State
fas·cism [fash-iz-uhm] Show IPA
noun
1.
( sometimes initial capital letter ) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
2.
( sometimes initial capital letter ) the philosophy, principles, or methods of fascism.
3.
( initial capital letter ) a political movement that employs the principles and methods of fascism, especially the one established by Mussolini in Italy 1922–43.
The Fascist State
Fascism has found adherents in all countries. Its essentially vague and emotional nature facilitates the development of unique national varieties, whose leaders often deny indignantly that they are fascists at all. In its dictatorial methods and in its use of brutal intimidation of the opposition by the militia and the secret police, fascism does not greatly distinguish itself from other despotic and totalitarian regimes. There are particular similarities with the Communist regime in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. However, unlike Communism, fascism abhors the idea of a classless society and sees desirable order only in a state in which each class has its distinct place and function. Representation by classes (i.e., capital, labor, farmers, and professionals) is substituted for representation by parties, and the corporative state is a part of fascist dogma.
Although Mussolini's and Hitler's governments tended to interfere considerably in economic life and to regulate its process, there can be no doubt that despite all restrictions imposed on them, the capitalist and landowning classes were protected by the fascist system, and many favored it as an obstacle to socialization. On the other hand, the state adopted a paternalistic attitude toward labor, improving its conditions in some respects, reducing unemployment through large-scale public works and armament programs, and controlling its leisure time through organized activities.
Many of these features were adopted by the Franco regime in Spain and by quasi-fascist dictators in Latin America (e.g., Juan Perón ) and elsewhere. A variation of fascism was the so-called clerico-fascist system set up in Austria under Engelbert Dollfuss . This purported to be based on the social and economic doctrines enunciated by Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI, which, however, were never put into operation.
Fascism (pron.: /ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism[1][2] that came to prominence in mid-20th century Europe. Fascists seek to unify their nation through a totalitarian state that promotes the mass mobilization of the national community,[3][4] relying on a vanguard party to initiate a revolution to organize the nation on fascist principles.[5] Hostile to liberal democracy, socialism, and communism, fascist movements share certain common features, including the veneration of the state, a devotion to a strong leader, and an emphasis on ultranationalism, ethnocentrism, and militarism. Fascism views political violence, war, and imperialism as a means to achieve national rejuvenation[3][6][7][8] and asserts that nations and races deemed superior should attain living space by displacing ones deemed weak or inferior.[9]
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a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
________________________ __________
Really? You made my fucking point. Thank you.
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a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
________________________ __________
Really? You made my fucking point. Thank you.
can you give some examples of Obama acting like a dictator with "complete power" (before you answer try to keep in mind images of real dictators like Pol Pot, Stalin, Saddam, the various nutbags in North Korea etc..) and also please cite some examples of Obama "forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism"
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can you give some examples of Obama acting like a dictator with "complete power" (before you answer try to keep in mind images of real dictators like Pol Pot, Stalin, Saddam, the various nutbags in North Korea etc..) and also please cite some examples of Obama "forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism"
NLRB appointments, violating the judges rules in issuing the permits for drilling, attacking the press who report on his criminal admn, the drone strikes, starting a war in lybia w no approval, running guns to mexican cartels, attacking Boeing and Gibson Guitar, abusing the IRS, abusing the DOJ, the seizing of ap records based on no evidence at all, etc etc
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can you give some examples of Obama acting like a dictator with "complete power" (before you answer try to keep in mind images of real dictators like Pol Pot, Stalin, Saddam, the various nutbags in North Korea etc..) and also please cite some examples of Obama "forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism"
Pol Pot's reign of terror pretty much matches obama's first two months in office.
There are many accounts of what happened during the time Pol Pot was in power. It is said that all the cities were evacuated and its residents were either killed or sent to work camps. Anyone who was suspected of being educated i.e. doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc... Were killed because they were enemies of the state. Citizens of the cities were denied basic human rights even including food. Families were outlawed and children were forced to leave their parents and pledge their support to Pol Pot. Their was never any attempt to form any type of government, and all communications to outside countries
ceased to exist (except for conflict with Vietnamese troops). Many died of disease because there were no longer any medicine or doctors. Refugees who make it to Thailand report atrocities of the worst kind:
executions of children, only because they were not born of peasant families or of Vietnamese or Chinese origin. Whosoever was suspected of being educated, or to be a member of a merchant family, was murdered: clubbed to death, not shot, in order to save ammunition
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NLRB appointments, violating the judges rules in issuing the permits for drilling, attacking the press who report on his criminal admn, the drone strikes, starting a war in lybia w no approval, running guns to mexican cartels, attacking Boeing and Gibson Guitar, abusing the IRS, abusing the DOJ, the seizing of ap records based on no evidence at all, etc etc
so you're saying you have no clue what the words "complete power" and "forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism" actually mean
you should spend a few days in North Korea
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so you're saying you have no clue what the words "complete power" and "forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism" actually mean
you should spend a few days in North Korea
he lives in NYC. it's nothing more than a taller, balder version of Pyongyang.
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he lives in NYC. it's nothing more than a taller, balder version of Pyongyang.
How many hours do you think 333 would be alive after his first post on the North Korean version of GB.com*
*of course this is a trick question nothing like GB.com would ever even be allowed
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How many hours do you think 333 would be alive after his first post on the North Korean version of GB.com*
*of course this is a trick question nothing like GB.com would ever even be allowed
I bet the message boards were no fun under Stalin.
All Gulags and 1.0k dialup speeds.
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so you're saying you have no clue what the words "complete power" and "forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism" actually mean
you should spend a few days in North Korea
He can't. this guy is a birther. nuff said.
He has a complete inability to discern.
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a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
________________________ __________
Really? You made my fucking point. Thank you.
No.
This demonstrates your complete inability to comprehend and or discern anything.
YOU ARE SIMPLY A PRODUCT OF THE SPIN MACHINE
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He can't. this guy is a birther. nuff said.
He has a complete inability to discern.
The IRS forcibly suprressed the voices of the Tea Party and now the DOJ is taking tyrannical steps to stop journalists from reporting on the obama admn.
What do you call that?
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The IRS forcibly suprressed the voices of the Tea Party and now the DOJ is taking tyrannical steps to stop journalists from reporting on the obama admn.
What do you call that?
no they didn't dipshit
no application was denied 501c4 status and certainly no ones voice for suppressed and most definitely no one was forcibly suppressed as it would in any other example of what we know as a dictatorship
you need to face the fact that you are mentally ill
no joke
get some help
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He can't. this guy is a birther. nuff said.
He has a complete inability to discern.
not just a "birther"
he clearly believes things that are demonstrably false
the guy has mental health issues
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no they didn't dipshit
no application was denied 501c4 status and certainly no ones voice for suppressed and most definitely no one was forcibly suppressed as it would in any other example of what we know as a dictatorship
you need to face the fact that you are mentally ill
no joke
get some help
Hey dipshit - they supressed them long enough so that they could not organize for the election. Being a liberal panti waist always crying about voter surpression - you should be upset over the obama crime wave.
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not just a "birther"
he clearly believes things that are demonstrably false
the guy has mental health issues
LOL - coming from the guy who thought GW was a lib ::) ::)
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Hey dipshit - they supressed them long enough so that they could not organize for the election. Being a liberal panti waist always crying about voter surpression - you should be upset over the obama crime wave.
again - completely FALSE
no group was stopped from speaking or in any way communicating their message
no Teabag vote was suppressed, no Teabag message was suppressed and certainly no one was violently or lethally suppressed as is common in dictatorships
btw - no dictorships voluntarily investigate and publicy apologize for nonsense like this IRS thing (and certainly not while fully in power)
again, the best thing you can do for yourself is take a step or two back and realize that you have a serious mental health problem
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The IRS forcibly suprressed the voices of the Tea Party and now the DOJ is taking tyrannical steps to stop journalists from reporting on the obama admn.
What do you call that?
I don't call it fascism. Nor do i claim we are a Fascist state or commy or what ever loony bull shit blabber that commonly runs out of your mouth.
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again, the best thing you can do for yourself is take a step or two back and realize that you have a serious mental health problem
Seriously, please do 333333
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I don't call it fascism. Nor do i claim we are a Fascist state or commy or what ever loony bull shit blabber that commonly runs out of your mouth.
Then what the fuck do you call it?
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Then what the fuck do you call it?
::)
You got issues dude. Get help.
again - completely FALSE
no group was stopped from speaking or in any way communicating their message
no Teabag vote was suppressed, no Teabag message was suppressed and certainly no one was violently or lethally suppressed as is common in dictatorships
btw - no dictorships voluntarily investigate and publicy apologize for nonsense like this IRS thing (and certainly not while fully in power)
again, the best thing you can do for yourself is take a step or two back and realize that you have a serious mental health problem
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::)
You got issues dude.
And you believe straws post in ight of what we have learned thus far?
LMFAO.
Stay in sheer denial - its laughable.
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And you believe straws post in ight of what we have learned thus far?
LMFAO.
Stay in sheer denial - its laughable.
Based on YOUR track record, I would believe Straw Immediately over you.
Dispute the points then. If you can.
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Based on YOUR track record, I would believe Straw Immediately over you.
Dispute the points then. If you can.
The facts have been reported over and over and over
500 TEA Party groups targeted, applications slow walked, no liberal groups targeted, outrageous demands for all sorts of documentation, numerous audits of romney donors and leaks of their private info, lady in charge of the irs division has husband hosting obama fundraisers, private info leaked to progressive groups, etc etc
Yeah nothing to see there - - - - - FORWARD!
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The facts have been reported over and over and over
500 TEA Party groups targeted, applications slow walked, no liberal groups targeted, outrageous demands for all sorts of documentation, numerous audits of romney donors and leaks of their private info, lady in charge of the irs division has husband hosting obama fundraisers, private info leaked to progressive groups, etc etc
Yeah nothing to see there - - - - - FORWARD!
you have ADD or something?
this is what you said:
The IRS forcibly suprressed the voices of the Tea Party and now the DOJ is taking tyrannical steps to stop journalists from reporting on the obama admn.
What do you call that?
now Dispute this:
no group was stopped from speaking or in any way communicating their message
no Teabag vote was suppressed, no Teabag message was suppressed and certainly no one was violently or lethally suppressed as is common in dictatorships
btw - no dictorships voluntarily investigate and publicy apologize for nonsense like this IRS thing (and certainly not while fully in power)
Can you?
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Yes - their applications were being slow walked and donors targeted for audits so that these groups were effectively hampered and bogged down w the irs chasing them than doing their thing while NOT ONE liberal group faced the same thing.
you have ADD or something?
this is what you said:
now Dispute this:
no group was stopped from speaking or in any way communicating their message
no Teabag vote was suppressed, no Teabag message was suppressed and certainly no one was violently or lethally suppressed as is common in dictatorships
btw - no dictorships voluntarily investigate and publicy apologize for nonsense like this IRS thing (and certainly not while fully in power)
Can you?
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Yes - their applications were being slow walked and donors targeted for audits so that these groups were effectively hampered and bogged down w the irs chasing them than doing their thing while NOT ONE liberal group faced the same thing.
How so?
How where they:
stopped from speaking or in any way communicating their message
no Teabag vote was suppressed, no Teabag message was suppressed and certainly no one was violently or lethally suppressed as is common in dictatorships
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How so?
Since my posts carry no weight with you - here you go - Obama's thugs in the govt went after big GOP donors, TEA party people with audits, investigations, inspections, etc. You think that does not have a chilling effect? GMAFB already with your head in the sand bs. Even the Prez of the AP came out and said Obama admn is supressing free speech in an unconstitutuionaL manner today.
But thats right - two dopey liberals from San Fran know better than everyone else. ::) ::)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348756/true-scandal-jillian-kay-melchior
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/20/irs_and_ap_scandals_cast_a_big_chill_on_free_speech__118469.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0516/Why-are-Obamacare-supporters-attacking-job-creators
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Since my posts carry no weight with you
They don't because you commonly lie and have demonstrated ineptitude in discerning reality from spin.
here you go - Obama's thugs in the govt went after big GOP donors, TEA party people with audits, investigations, inspections, etc. You think that does not have a chilling effect? GMAFB already with your head in the sand bs. Even the Prez of the AP came out and said Obama admn is supressing free speech in an unconstitutuionaL manner today.
But thats right - two dopey liberals from San Fran know better than everyone else. ::) ::)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348756/true-scandal-jillian-kay-melchior
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/20/irs_and_ap_scandals_cast_a_big_chill_on_free_speech__118469.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0516/Why-are-Obamacare-supporters-attacking-job-creators
None of that shows how we are in a Fascist State with OB as Dictator and it doesn't counter your assertion:
The IRS forcibly suprressed the voices of the Tea Party
and or dispute this:
no group was stopped from speaking or in any way communicating their message
no Teabag vote was suppressed, no Teabag message was suppressed and certainly no one was violently or lethally suppressed as is common in dictatorships
________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ____________________
PS: almost anyone knows better than you.
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They don't because you commonly lie and have demonstrated ineptitude in discerning reality from spin.
None of that shows how we are in a Fascist State with OB as Dictator and it doesn't counter your assertion:
and or dispute this:
no group was stopped from speaking or in any way communicating their message
no Teabag vote was suppressed, no Teabag message was suppressed and certainly no one was violently or lethally suppressed as is common in dictatorships
________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ____________________
PS: almost anyone knows better than you.
Right selectively auditing and targeting donors of the opposition party w the mechanism of the IRS is totally legit.
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;)
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Right selectively auditing and targeting donors of the opposition party w the mechanism of the IRS is totally legit.
Still cant back up your claim i see.
Not that i was expecting you would.
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Still cant back up your claim i see.
Not that i was expecting you would.
Are you seriously this fucked up in real life too? The testimony before the panel and IG Report prove it - go back and watch it instead of making an ass of yourself.
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Are you seriously this fucked up in real life too? The testimony before the panel and IG Report prove it - go back and watch it instead of making an ass of yourself.
No it did not.
I am the same in real life. I live in reality.
You do not. The list of evidence supporting that you do not live in reality is long.
You said we are a fascist state.
I provided the definition.
You provided your argument
Your argument was false: NO LAWS preventing the Tea Party from their activities prior to OB in office AND while he is in office. OB does not have dictatorial powers. The Tea Party was not silenced.
Straw destroyed you. I destroyed you.
You still haven't addressed his counter arguments.
You have failed as usual.
Admit it: We are NOT a Fascist State. Move on.
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Well we are a fascist state already by oba'as war on the press - which even liberals today are admitting to.
FORWARD!!!!
FAIL
another great example of delusion and the inability to back it up.
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Put down the crack pipe - THEY ADMITTED THAT THEY FLAGGED GROUPD BASED SOLELY ON NAMES LINKED TO THE TEA PARTY AND NOTHING ELSE.
Or did you not listen to that either?
No it did not.
I am the same in real life. I live in reality.
You do not. The list of evidence supporting that you do not live in reality is long.
You said we are a fascist state.
I provided the definition.
You provided your argument
Your argument was false: NO LAWS preventing the Tea Party from their activities prior to OB in office AND while he is in office. OB does not have dictatorial powers. The Tea Party was not silenced.
Straw destroyed you. I destroyed you.
You still haven't addressed his counter arguments.
You have failed as usual.
Admit it: We are NOT a Fascist State. Move on.
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I haven't read all of the posts, especially those by the Village Idiot, but I don't think voter suppression happened. That said, some of the stories coming out are that people were audited, visited by the FBI, asked invasive questions, didn't have their applications approved or processed, etc. That's not necessarily voter suppression, but it's definitely voter intimidation.
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Put down the crack pipe - THEY ADMITTED THAT THEY FLAGGED GROUPD BASED SOLELY ON NAMES LINKED TO THE TEA PARTY AND NOTHING ELSE.
Or did you not listen to that either?
Not arguing that the IRS did this...however
None of which defines us a fascist state.
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I haven't read all of the posts, especially those by the Village Idiot, but I don't think voter suppression happened. That said, some of the stories coming out are that people were audited, visited by the FBI, asked invasive questions, didn't have their applications approved or processed, etc. That's not necessarily voter suppression, but it's definitely voter intimidation.
Don't disagree that these did happen. How you or I interpret them is a different story. Had these things continued and not been stopped then there might be the beginnings of an argument there but NOT one that supports us as being a Fascist State
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Well we are a fascist state already by oba'as war on the press - which even liberals today are admitting to.
FORWARD!!!!
Keep in mind, this is the charge: Well we are a fascist state already by Obamas war on the press
the charge is not supported
the charge is untrue
the charge doesn't not fit the definition of fascist state.
3333333=FAIL
again.
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Don't disagree that these did happen. How you or I interpret them is a different story. Had these things continued and not been stopped then there might be the beginnings of an argument there but NOT one that supports us as being a Fascist State
I don't think we're a facist state. What we have is misconduct by government officials.
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I don't think we're a facist state. What we have is misconduct by government officials.
No doubt.
And i am glad its exposed.
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No doubt.
And i am glad its exposed.
Me too.
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Gov't Memo Proves CBS's Sharyl Attkisson Got Benghazi Email Story Right
By Warner Todd Huston
20 May 2013, 6:23 AM
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/05/19/Gov-t-Memo-Proves-CBS-s-Sharyl-Attkisson-Got-Benghazi-Email-Story-Right
One of the earliest reporters revealing the internal emails about Benghazi exchanged between the U.S. Department of State and the intel community was CBS' Sharyl Attkisson. Her original report was based on "written notes" and, as she said from the beginning, was not derived directly from the emails themselves. Despite this disclaimer, some called her reckless for her reporting. But in the end, her reports are still quite close to the actual emails and shows she did not get the story wrong.
Attkisson was accused of not disclosing that her report was written from congressional insiders, who gave her access to their notes after seeing the original emails in Committee. To put the accusations against Attkisson to rest, Mediaite obtained an internal CBS memo that shows that she never claimed that her report was derived directly from the emails themselves.
When Attkisson handed in her original report on the email exchange, she clearly noted that her work was based on notes taken by her sources.
Note: *Emails were provided by the Administration to certain Congressional Committees for limited review. The Committees were not permitted to copy the emails, so they made handwritten notes. Therefore, parts of the quoted emails may be paraphrased.
This notation, however, did not make it to the May 10 story CBS posted to the web, nor was it pointed out on any of the CBS TV reports on the story.
No explanation was given for that lapse.
Mediaite also discovered that after the CBS reports began to air, Attkisson reminded her CBS bosses that her report was based on hand written notes, not the actual emails.
Attkisson's note read, "Just an FYI: The talking point draft emails read to CBS News last Friday were from handwritten notes, and the attorney source explained why they were not direct quotes and could not be represented as such, as I noted at the top of my reporting for important context (highlighted in red below)."
Noah Rothman goes on to point out that Attkisson's original report, even though taken from notes on the emails and not the emails themselves, "is strikingly similar to what was actually written by members of the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Agency."
It all amounts to a vindication of Sharyl Attkisson's reporting not any sort of proof that her work was "reckless" or irresponsible.
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Benghazi: Where Was President Waldo During Attack?
Investor's Business Daily ^ | May 20, 2013 | IBD EDITORIALS
Posted on Monday, May 20, 2013 7:05:21 PM by
Benghazigate: The lack of a timeline for what the commander-in-chief was doing the night terrorists murdered our ambassador to Libya and three others is an "irrelevant fact," according to a key White House aide.
Playing the role Sunday of former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who last Sept. 16 went on all five talk shows to parrot the administration line that Benghazi was provoked by a video, was White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer.
Following in Rice's footsteps, he announced that the details of where President Obama was and what he was doing that fateful night were an "irrelevant fact."
"Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace tried to pin down why we have pictures of Obama sitting in the Situation Room the night Osama bin Laden was killed, but on the night Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed we don't have so much as an artist's sketch.
"The president was kept up to date on this as it was happening throughout the entire night, from the moment it started till the end," Pfeiffer said.
So he didn't go to bed that night to rest up for his Las Vegas fundraiser the next day? Pfeiffer wouldn't elaborate.
Pressing Pfeiffer to fill in the blanks, Wallace noted that Obama was with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey in a previously scheduled meeting on the afternoon of Sept. 11, around the time the Benghazi attack started.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
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Ex-Diplomats Report New Benghazi Whistleblowers with Info Devastating to Clinton and Obama
PJ Media ^ | May 21st, 2013 | Roger L Simon
Posted on May 21, 2013 4:01:08 AM EDT by Pharmboy
More whistleblowers will emerge shortly in the escalating Benghazi scandal, according to two former U.S. diplomats who spoke with PJ Media Monday afternoon.
These whistleblowers, colleagues of the former diplomats, are currently securing legal counsel because they work in areas not fully protected by the Whistleblower law.
According to the diplomats, what these whistleblowers will say will be at least as explosive as what we have already learned about the scandal, including details about what really transpired in Benghazi that are potentially devastating to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
snip...
Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.
Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.”
This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda – indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.
snip... likened it to the Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson’s War about a clueless congressman who supplies Stingers to the Afghan guerrillas. “It’s as if Hillary and the others just watched that movie and said ‘Hey, let’s do that!’” the diplomat said.
He added that he and his colleagues think the leaking of General David Petraeus’ affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was timed to silence the former CIA chief on these matters.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
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In January Senator Rand Paul accused the Obama Administration of a cover-up for running guns to terrorist groups in Libya and the region.
Via Hannity:
Hillary Clinton admitted in testimony that terrorists used weapons from Libya in the attack gas plant attack in Algeria.
Now, more Benghazi whistle-blowers are reportedly ready to testify on Obama’s missiles to Al-Qaeda program.
PJ Media reported:
More whistleblowers will emerge shortly in the escalating Benghazi scandal, according to two former U.S. diplomats who spoke with PJ Media Monday afternoon.
These whistleblowers, colleagues of the former diplomats, are currently securing legal counsel because they work in areas not fully protected by the Whistleblower law.
According to the diplomats, what these whistleblowers will say will be at least as explosive as what we have already learned about the scandal, including details about what really transpired in Benghazi that are potentially devastating to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The former diplomats inform PJM the new revelations concentrate in two areas — what Ambassador Chris Stevens was actually doing in Benghazi and the pressure put on General Carter Ham, then in command of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and therefore responsible for Libya, not to act to protect jeopardized U.S. personnel.
Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.
Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.”
This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda – indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.
The former diplomat who spoke with PJ Media regarded the whole enterprise as totally amateurish and likened it to the Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson’s War about a clueless congressman who supplies Stingers to the Afghan guerrillas. “It’s as if Hillary and the others just watched that movie and said ‘Hey, let’s do that!’” the diplomat said.
In April Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren told Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday that the US armed Libyan rebels with missiles that showed up in Israel’s backyard.
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Exclusive: CIA Honored Benghazi Chief in Secret Ceremony
by Eli LakeMay 21, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
Part of why the State Department has taken the brunt of the political blame for the Benghazi attack, writes Eli Lake, is that clandestine services by definition have very little public oversight.
At a secret February ceremony at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., the chief of the CIA’s base in Benghazi the night of the 9/11 anniversary attacks there was awarded one of the agency’s highest intelligence medals, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.
The interior of the burnt US consulate building in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. (Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images)
The honor given behind closed doors to “Bob,” the officer who was in charge of the Benghazi intelligence annex and CIA base that was attacked in the early morning of September 12, 2012 and then abandoned for nearly three weeks, illustrates the murky lines of command that preceded the attack, and helped make it a politically volatile issue. While the State Department was responsible for elements of the security for the diplomatic mission at Benghazi, the mission itself was used primarily for intelligence activities and most the U.S. officials there and at the nearby annex were CIA officers who used State Department cover.
That purposeful ambiguity between diplomatic and intelligence efforts abroad has meant that at home, the State Department has taken almost all of the public blame for an error that was in part the fault of the CIA. And while CIA contractors performed heroically on the evening of the Benghazi attacks, Bob was also responsible in part for one major failure the night of the Benghazi attack: his officers were responsible for vetting the February 17 Martyr’s Brigade, the militia that was supposed to be the first responder on the night of the attack, but melted away when the diplomatic mission was attacked.
To be sure, the CIA has reviewed what went wrong in the Benghazi attacks in its own internal report. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has conducted three classified hearings with CIA officials regarding Benghazi. CIA deputy director Michael Morell is scheduled to testify in closed session before the committee on Wednesday regarding Benghazi.
But those hearings have been closed to the public as opposed to the grueling public hearings of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Earlier this month that committee held a hearing that featured YouTube–friendly moments from witnesses hostile to the administration like former deputy chief of mission Gregory Hicks, who described what was likely the last phone call of Ambassador Chris Stevens, one of four Americans who were killed that evening.
What’s more, the CIA’s own internal review was not led by outside figures like the State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB) headed by a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and a former U.S. ambassador, Thomas Pickering. Nor was the CIA review made public.
Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell arrives at the Capitol to attend closed-door meetings about ongoing intelligence activities related to the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
If you are talking about a clandestine service, it’s very difficult to conduct that oversight in a public way.
Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chairman of the House committee’s panel on national security and the first lawmaker to contact Hicks after the Benghazi attacks, said there are special challenges in performing oversight of the CIA. Even though the CIA’s role at the Benghazi mission and nearby annex has been widely reported in the U.S. and international press, its role in Benghazi remains a classified secret.
“If you are talking about a clandestine service, it’s very difficult to conduct that oversight in a public way,” Chaffetz said. “You are talking about people’s lives. We have to be ultra-cautious in talking about something that may cost lives. When you start getting into sources and methods you just can’t go there in a public setting.”
Chaffetz has some experience in the matter himself. In a Benghazi hearing in October, he abruptly interrupted the hearing when State Department officials testifying referenced an aerial photograph of the Benghazi mission that disclosed the CIA annex more than a mile away.
A U.S. official familiar with the Libyan security situation explained that the agency did not have many good options for working with a militia in Benghazi.
“The host country is responsible for perimeter security, but no one can provide guarantees,” this official said. “Typically with unstable and dangerous places the security elements are unreliable. No matter how many relationships are developed and precautions taken, you can’t make an insecure environment completely safe. That night some Libyan militia members bravely and immediately answered the call for help, some didn’t, and others took time to coordinate their eventual support to the evacuation.”
Another U.S. intelligence official disputed this view. This official said the failure for the CIA at Benghazi was the mistaken assumption that the Zintan tribe in Benghazi—that provided many of the fighters for the February 17 Martyr’s Brigade—would have the same loyalties as the Zintan tribe in Tripoli, which had protected several senior U.S. officials including Hillary Clinton in her visit last year to Libya. “The CIA failed at mapping the human terrain,” this official said. “They did not understand the politics in Benghazi and we paid the price.”
Despite the CIA’s role in vetting the Libyan militia that failed the U.S. mission the night of the attack, the Republican chairman and the Democratic vice chairman of the House intelligence committee have both said publicly they do not believe the CIA committed an intelligence failure in the run-up to the Benghazi attack.
On May 4, appearing on CBS Face the Nation, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the Democratic vice chairman of the House intelligence committee said, “The most important issue though too, from an intelligence perspective… there was not an intelligence failure. We did not have intelligence ahead of time as it related to this incident.”
Nonetheless, some U.S. intelligence officials have privately complained that Bob, the Benghazi base chief should not get a medal. Two such officers told the Daily Beast that Bob—who was based in the CIA annex--also gave the initial order on the evening of the attacks to the CIA contractors to gather more information about the attack before rushing off to the diplomatic mission.
The State Department’s own Accountability Review Board (ARB) found there was a 23-minute gap between the initial distress call from the diplomatic mission at 9:42 local Benghazi time to the time when the CIA contractors departed the annex at 10:05 pm. The initial delay, according to two intelligence officials, could have made a difference the night of the rescue.
The ARB however disputed this notion. It said, “The departure of the Annex team was not delayed by orders from superiors; the team leader decided on his own to depart the Annex compound once it was apparent, despite a brief delay to permit their continuing efforts, that rapid support from local security elements was not forthcoming.”
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What did Obama do on 9/11/2012?
Exclusive: Jack Cashill asks if BHO pulled a Clinton a la '96 during Benghazi attack
Published: 17 hours ago
Jack CashillAbout | Email | Archive
On this past Sunday morning, Chris Wallace of Fox News grilled the administration’s newly anointed flak catcher, White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer.
One critical question was how Obama spent that long night of Sept. 11, 2012, while his charges were busy dying in Benghazi.
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“With all due respect,” asked Wallace, “you didn’t answer my question. What did the president do that night?” This was a good question and one that prompts a careful look at the time line.
At 3:40 p.m. Washington time on Sept. 11, 2012, U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens in Benghazi called his No. 2 man, Greg Hicks, and told him, “We’re under attack.”
(All times cited will be EDT, six hours earlier than Libyan time).
At 4:05 p.m. the State Department Operations Center issued an alert to all relevant agencies, “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack.”
At 4:25 p.m. a six-member CIA team headed by Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods arrived at Stevens’ compound from the nearby annex.
Under heavy fire, Woods’ team recovered the body of Foreign Service IT specialist Sean Smith but could not find Stevens’ body in the burning building.
At 5 p.m. President Barack Obama had a pre-scheduled meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who briefed him on the Benghazi situation.
At 6 p.m. Woods and his CIA team arrived back at the annex, which they would defend Alamo-style for the next six hours. They would kill an estimated 60 Libyans before the night was through.
At 6:07 p.m. the State Department Operations Center shared a report from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for the Benghazi attack. The terror group also called for an attack on the Embassy in Tripoli.
At 7:30 p.m. or thereabouts Obama engaged in an hour-long phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Obama hoped to mend fences with Netanyahu to help secure the Jewish vote in the upcoming election.
After roughly 8:30 p.m., there is no known accounting of Obama’s time or whereabouts.
At 11:15 p.m. Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, another former SEAL, were killed in a mortar assault at the annex. Doherty had just arrived as part of a six-man team from Tripoli.
At 1:40 a.m., having evacuated the annex, the first group of Americans flew out of Benghazi bound for Tripoli. They saw Stevens’ body at the airport and confirmed his death.
Said Pfeiffer to Wallace when asked about Obama’s evening, “He was in constant touch with his national security team and kept up to date with the events as they were happening.”
Wallace then listed all the critical people with whom Obama had little or no conversation – the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs.
Pfeiffer clarified, “He was talking to his national security staff, his National Security Council – people who would keep him up to date as these things were happening.”
“Was he in the situation room?” Wallace asked.
“I don’t remember what room he was in that night,” said Pfeiffer. “That’s a largely irrelevant fact.” No, it is not irrelevant at all.
I cannot say for sure where Obama was that evening, but if the night of July 17, 1996, set a precedent, Obama was likely in the White House family quarters.
For the record, at 8:35 p.m. on that turbulent night in the election year of 1996, President Bill Clinton and wife Hillary left a Washington fundraiser and headed back to the White House by motorcade.
At 8:31 p.m., two FAA veterans at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center observed a target arching and intersecting with Paris-bound TWA Flight 800 as it headed east off Long Island’s south shore.
A manager from that center rushed the radar data to the FAA technical center in Atlantic City, and from there it was faxed to FAA headquarters in Washington and rushed “immediately” to the White House situation room.
It was in this room, “in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 bombing,” as Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos unwittingly told Peter Jennings on Sept. 11, 2001, that all key parties converged.
“This looks bad,” said Ron Schleede of the National Transportation Safety Board upon first seeing the data that “suggested something fast made the turn and took the airplane.”
Anti-terror czar Richard Clarke got the message too. By 9 p.m., he was driving in to the White House to convene a meeting of his security group, not at all the norm for a plane crash.
“I dreaded what I thought was about to happen,” Clarke wrote in his best-seller “Against All Enemies.” Clarke called it “The Eisenhower option,” a retaliatory strike against Iran.
When President Clinton met with friendly historian Taylor Branch on Aug. 2, 1996, he also traced the TWA 800 disaster to Iran. “They want war,” Branch quoted Clinton as saying.
On the night of July 17, however, the president chose not to join Clarke and the other agency representatives in the situation room.
Clinton remained holed up in the family quarters with Hillary. Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson and others have confirmed the president’s location that evening.
Patterson was in a position to know. He carried the nuclear football for the president, and he too was in the White House that night, though purposefully kept out of the loop.
The one person Patterson has tentatively cited as being in the family quarters with the Clintons is Sandy Berger, the deputy director of the NSA and the Clintons’ political consigliere.
As it happened, National Security Adviser Tony Lake, Sandy Berger’ boss, was not invited to the family quarters. Lake was known to excuse himself from meetings when they turned political.
That night Berger and the Clintons gathered information from the FAA radar, from the satellite data and from the eyewitness accounts and translated the data into electoral strategy.
By 3 a.m. Clinton had apparently gathered enough information to call Lake with the following message: “Dust off the contingency plans.”
Dust them off, yes, but let’s not get too serious about them. In late summer 1996, with the election comfortably in the bag, war was the last thing the Clintons wanted or needed.
On Sept. 11, 2012, war was the last thing Obama wanted or needed as well. He had already bagged Osama bin Laden, pacified al-Qaida and liberated Libya.
Or so he repeated endlessly. Foreign policy was alleged to be his electoral strong suit. Given the political dynamics, Obama likely retreated, just as the Clintons had, to the family quarters.
As Pfeiffer said, Obama probably did talk to “people who would keep him up to date as these things were happening.”
Obama and certain of these people, the political insiders, would have spent the night translating national security data into electoral strategy.
After all, Obama had a big fundraiser the next day in Vegas. That did not allow much time to establish an alibi that would preserve his carefully crafted bin Laden-slayer narrative.
It was a close call, but with a little help from the media – a special shout-out to CNN’s Candy Crowley! – the alibi worked just well enough to get the man re-elected.
History does repeat itself.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/what-did-obama-do-on-9112012/#WaFgXmu9WFw0agkO.99
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when is the stupid party going to realize they had no assets in the area,as they said the repubs have a comical view of the military
sooner or later an adult will take the stupid party people aside and whisper...."CIA operation, drop it" and the hearings will stop.
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Hillary Policy of Serving Up Benghazi Scapegoats May Be Backfiring
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 21, 2013 @ 12:56 pm In The Point | 7 Comments
It was obvious to everyone that Hillary Clinton only took the Secretary of State post as a consolation prize from which to launch a second bid for the White House. Her career at State consisted of pointless trips and press conferences that accomplished nothing. Some of this could be blamed on Obama, but everyone Hillary was there to polish up her profile for 2016.
Unfortunately for Hillary, the only part of her State Department tenure that attracted any notice, aside from the botched reset button with Russia, was Benghazi.
Hillary Clinton’s response, or that of her close advisers, was to begin serving up scapegoats, intimidating and silencing longtime career State Department people who were in the know, and using others as scapegoats. That policy backfired badly when Gregory Hicks showed up to testify.
Hicks was a natural ally who had been alienated by the political careerism of Hillary Clinton and her people. If not for their abusive behavior, it’s doubtful that he would have come to tell his story. But the attempts to intimidate him, backfired. And he isn’t the only one.
Take Raymond Maxwell, who claims he unfairly got the blame for the lack of security, when that wasn’t even his wheelhouse.
The decision to place Maxwell on administrative leave was made by Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, according to three State Department officials with direct knowledge of the events. On the day after the unclassified version of the ARB’s report was released in December, Mills called Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones and directed her to have Maxwell leave his job immediately.
“Cheryl Mills directed me to remove you immediately from the [deputy assistant secretary] position,” Jones told Maxwell, according to Maxwell.
The decision to remove Maxwell and not Jones seems to conflict with the finding of the ARB that responsibility for the security failures leading up to the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi should fall on more senior officials.
“We fixed [the responsibility] at the assistant-secretary level, which is in our view the appropriate place to look, where the decision making in fact takes place, where, if you like, the rubber hits the road,” Pickering said when releasing the ARB report.
Mills had also targeted Gregory Hicks. Mills was not operating as a State Department figure, but as part of the Clinton 2016 campaign. And Maxwell seemed like he would make a good scapegoat because he had admitted to not reading the intel and was going to retire shortly.
Cheryl Mills isn’t a career State Department figure. She’s a Clinton loyalist who follows them around and covers up for them. Mills was a Deputy White House Counsel and worked at the presidential campaigns of both Clintons. Essentially, she was Hillary Clinton’s lawyer. And career diplomatic personnel are not too happy when a bigwig’s political lawyer and campaign adviser begins chucking them off a cliff to protect her political godmother.
A similar process may be happening for Obama and the CIA, which resents being used as a scapegoat for administration malfeasance. The CIA tends to be more guarded than State, but reports suggest that the trickle of figures coming forward may become a flood.
Hillary alienated her natural allies at the State Department. The people who wanted her to look good so she could make them look good and sacrificed them to cover up her mismanagement. Instead of taking responsibility, she began looking for people to blame. The resentment it has caused will not subside quickly and raises real questions about her fitness for any elected or unelected office.
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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/hillary-policy-of-serving-up-benghazi-scapegoats-may-be-backfiring/
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Obama Refuses to Bring Benghazi Killers to Justice Because He Wants to Try Them in Court
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 21, 2013 @ 6:07 pm In The Point | 2 Comments
Back in October of last year, Obama said of the Benghazi terrorist attack that “my biggest priority now is bringing those folks to justice and I think the American people have seen that’s a commitment I’ll always keep.”
Some of you might be skeptical about his commitment to investigating Tea Party groups bringing the “folks” over for dinner and justice. But never fear. It’s Obama’s biggest priority. Right after amnesty for illegal aliens, banning guns and playing golf.
Also throwing concerts in the White House, doing comedy skits with reporters and well a whole bunch of other stuff. But after all those other things, it’s his biggest priority.
And the results are in.
The U.S. has identified five men who might be responsible for the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, and has enough evidence to justify seizing them by military force as suspected terrorists, officials say. But there isn’t enough proof to try them in a U.S. civilian court as the Obama administration prefers.
The men remain at large while the FBI gathers evidence. But the investigation has been slowed by the reduced U.S. intelligence presence in the region since the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks, and by the limited ability to assist by Libya’s post-revolutionary law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which are still in their infancy since the overthrow of dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
Since liberated Libya is on the verge of being overthrown by the Muslim Brotherhood and Benghazi is under the control of the same militias who attacked the mission, and the FBI couldn’t continue its investigation because the city was too unsafe, Obama’s biggest priority after throwing lavish banquets and promoting national health care is not looking too good.
Sure Obama could send them to Gitmo, but Obama didn’t even want to send Osama to Gitmo.
A senior administration official said the FBI has identified a number of individuals that it believes have information or may have been involved, and is considering options to bring those responsible to justice. But taking action in remote eastern Libya would be difficult.
FBI investigators are hoping for more evidence, such as other video of the attack that might show the suspects in the act of setting the fires that ultimately killed the ambassador and his communications specialist, or firing the mortars hours later at the CIA base where the surviving diplomats took shelter — or a Libyan witness willing to testify against the suspects in a U.S. courtroom.
Right. Or maybe they’ll just phone and turn themselves in hoping they can get $278,000 like Nidal Hasan.
Obama saw an opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial, which Attorney General Eric Holder had planned for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
This time, the president tells Bowden, he was prepared to bring bin Laden back and put him on trial in a federal court. “We worked through the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article III.” Obama continues:
“I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.”
Biggest priority indeed.
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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-refuses-to-bring-benghazi-killers-to-justice-because-he-wants-to-try-them-in-court/
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An AP report via Fox Nation via claims that although the FBI has identified five men believed to have been behind the September 11 Benghazi attacks, those men remain free because President Barack Obama will not allow the military to seize them.
According to the report, the FBI says it has evidence sufficient to support seizing the men as "suspected terrorists." Yet because such an action would have to be carried out by the military, Obama appears unwilling to authorize it.
Therefore, for the time being, the men are free while the FBI seeks enough additional evidence to clear a higher legal hurdle--which means "gathering enough proof to try them in a U.S. civilian court."
According to the AP, that is what "the Obama administration prefers."
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33,
when will the kneepadders start to use the "impeachment" word?
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(AP) FBI ID's Benghazi suspects _ but no arrests yet
By KIMBERLY DOZIER
AP Intelligence Writer
WASHINGTON
U.S. officials say they have identified five men they believe might be behind the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year. The officials say they have enough evidence to justify seizing them by military force as suspected terrorists _ but not enough proof to try them in a U.S. civilian court as the Obama administration prefers.
So the officials say the men remain at large while the FBI gathers more evidence. The decision not to seize the men militarily underscores the White House's aim to move away from hunting terrorists as enemy combatants and toward trying them as criminals in a civilian justice system.
The officials spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss sensitive briefings publicly.
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Obama Refuses to Bring Benghazi Killers to Justice Because He Wants to Try Them in Court
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 21, 2013 @ 6:07 pm In The Point | 2 Comments
The only Islamic terrorists Obama wants to capture are ones that are already dead.
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Obama Refuses to Bring Benghazi Killers to Justice Because He Wants to Try Them in Court
this quote is hilarious in part because you are a lawyer.
Refuses to bring them to justice....but try them in court....
wow....thats a title fail there bro
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this quote is hilarious in part because you are a lawyer.
Refuses to bring them to justice....but try them in court....
wow....thats a title fail there bro
Obama, the communist terrorist you voted for 2x over, aides and abets terrorisrts
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this quote is hilarious in part because you are a lawyer.
Refuses to bring them to justice....but try them in court....
wow....thats a title fail there bro
Harder to convict them in regular court, yet they ARE terrorists.
If you don't get that, then YOU fail.
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Harder to convict them in regular court, yet they ARE terrorists.
If you don't get that, then YOU fail.
]
Mal excuses anything and everything b/c obama is 1/2 black - forgive him
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ok lets try this again....
Refuses to bring them to justice, Wants to try them in court...
please tell me you see the irony of this post
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]
Mal excuses anything and everything b/c obama is 1/2 black - forgive him
ok....
ill phrase it another way
Obama wants to try them in court instead of bring them to justice.....
Dude even a brain retard like yourself has to see the irony in this title...
Malcolm refuses to play football, but instead he will run down a field with a helmet, shoulder pads, cleats, a football and he will score touchdowns.
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ok lets try this again....
Refuses to bring them to justice, Wants to try them in court...
please tell me you see the irony of this post
Obama is playing cutsie on this too trying to let them get away w this.
Bro - honestly - no kidding aside - Go fucking F yourself 10x over for the bullshit you now defend and kneepad SOLELY out od racial solidarity.
you are a disgrace as is the piece of fucking shit you voted for 2x over
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Hey shitstain - this was a terrorist attack on the anniversay of 9/11 that the ghetto coke head obama lied about and went to a fundraiser the next day w Jay Z and blamed on a fake video
Keep up the kneepadding - looks great to everyone else.
ok....
ill phrase it another way
Obama wants to try them in court instead of bring them to justice.....
Dude even a brain retard like yourself has to see the irony in this title...
Malcolm refuses to play football, but instead he will run down a field with a helmet, shoulder pads, cleats, a football and he will score touchdowns.
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Obama is playing cutsie on this too trying to let them get away w this.
Bro - honestly - no kidding aside - Go fucking F yourself 10x over for the bullshit you now defend and kneepad SOLELY out od racial solidarity.
you are a disgrace as is the piece of fucking shit you voted for 2x over
lmao...im seriously laughing my ass off right now....i just asked to consider the irony of the title and then you go full retard.
I refuse to get buff, instead, i will go to the gym, lift weights, eat protiens and carbs and then lift some more
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Hey shitstain - this was a terrorist attack on the anniversay of 9/11 that the ghetto coke head obama lied about and went to a fundraiser the next day w Jay Z and blamed on a fake video
Keep up the kneepadding - looks great to everyone else.
Do you have the ADD or some kind of MPD....
Im talking about a title of an article and youre going around the world talking all crazy....
3333 refuses to get his JD..instead he will just go to law school and pass the bar....
do you get where im going with this...its a retarded title....now you can agree and say the writer fucked this one up.. or you can go on about Jay Z and Kenya and Golf
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lmao...im seriously laughing my ass off right now....i just asked to consider the irony of the title and then you go full retard.
I refuse to get buff, instead, i will go to the gym, lift weights, eat protiens and carbs and then lift some more
you do laugh - cause like obama - you dont give a fucking rats ass if people die, corruption occurs, lies are told, cover ups are happening so long as the head 95% in charge is not put into prison where he belongs for this
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Do you have the ADD or some kind of MPD....
Im talking about a title of an article and youre going around the world talking all crazy....
3333 refuses to get his JD..instead he will just go to law school and pass the bar....
do you get where im going with this...its a retarded title....now you can agree and say the writer fucked this one up.. or you can go on about Jay Z and Kenya and Golf
bump
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bump
Bump for what - obama = fail
many deadm cover up, incompetence, etc.
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Bump for what - obama = fail
many deadm cover up, incompetence, etc.
try to stay on topic...
do you not see the retarded title fail?
"refuses justice, seeks trial"
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try to stay on topic...
do you not see the retarded title fail?
"refuses justice, seeks trial"
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so thats a no
you are a complete dumbass
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Hey 333 - didn't you just claim a few pages earlier that Obama was a ruthless dictator who has "complete power" and "forcibly suppresses opposition and criticism" and "regiments all industry, commerce, etc.,
please try to make up your mind and stick with one or the other
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http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/05/11/wow-cbs-news-president-and-wh-official-tied-to-benghazi-scandal-are-brothers-n1593081
One of the mainstream media journalists whose pursuit of the truth has been truly tenacious and nonpartisan is CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson. Her tough reporting has made life difficult for everyone from Hillary Clinton to the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans. She's also been relentless on the Obama administration's Fast & Furious gun-running scandal -- and, of course, Benghazi. As we mentioned this week, Attkisson's tough investigative journalism is starting to bother unnamed CBS News executives. Here's Politico's scoop, in case you missed it:
But from where Attkisson is sitting, there are actually two Goliaths, one of which is almost entirely absent from the Post profile. The second Goliath is CBS News, which has grown increasingly frustrated with Attkisson's Benghazi campaign. CBS News executives see Attkisson wading dangerously close to advocacy on the issue, network sources have told POLITICO. Attkisson can't get some of her stories on the air, and is thus left feeling marginalized and underutilized. That, in part, is why Attkisson is in talks to leave CBS ahead of contract, as POLITICO reported in April. Farhi mentions "internal conflicts" in the final paragraph, though he seems to dismiss them. The "internal conflicts" are indeed real -- Attkisson is still eyeing an exit, according to sources -- and provide important context for today's piece.
My analysis of this report was highly critical of CBS News. The network appears to be penalizing one of its best correspondents because she's doing her job too aggressively. Conservatives quickly imputed a political motive to CBS News' internal drama, but the Daily Caller has uncovered a connection that suggests there's a striking personal angle to this controversy, as well:
The brother of a top Obama administration official is also the president of CBS News, and the network may be days away from dropping one of its top investigative reporters for covering the administration’s scandals too aggressively. CBS News executives have reportedly expressed frustration with their own reporter, Sharyl Attkisson, who has steadily covered the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack in Libya since late last year...On Friday, ABC News reported that the Benghazi talking points went through 12 revisions before they were used on the public. The White House was intimately involved in that process, ABC reported, and the talking points were scrubbed free of their original references to a terror attack. That reporting revealed that President Obama’s deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes — brother of CBS News president David Rhodes — was instrumental in changing the talking points in September 2012. ABC’s reporting revealed that Ben Rhodes, who has a masters in fiction from NYU, called a meeting to discuss the talking points at the White House on September 15, 2012.
Well then. "CBS News executives" are wringing their hands that Sharyl Attkisson maybe "wading dangerously close" to advocacy on Benghazi. It's now entirely reasonable to ask if the top executive at the network may be "wading dangerously close" to a massive conflict of interest. Is David Rhodes trying to protect his brother -- who's just been revealed to be knee-deep in the Benghazi cover-up -- by muzzling and marginalizing a problematic journalist within his news division? Kudos to the Caller for shining the spotlight on that relationship, but it's amazing that no one connected those dots sooner. How many people in the elite MSM orbit are aware that Ben and David Rhodes are brothers? And they definitely are brothers, by the way; The New York Times confirmed that fact in a glowing profile of the younger Rhodes in March:
The son of a conservative-leaning Episcopalian father from Texas and a more liberal Jewish mother from New York, Mr. Rhodes grew up in a home where even sports loyalties were divided: he and his mother are ardent Mets fans; his father and his older brother, David, root for the Yankees. “No one in that house agreed on anything,” said David Rhodes, who is now the president of CBS News.
If Sharyl Attkisson continues to be relegated to the sidelines, or is even shown the door, at CBS News over her Benghazi coverage, the public must demand full disclosure about David Rhodes' role in that decision-making process. The Rhodes brothers' familial tie may be a bizarre, irrelevant coincidence. It's possible. But it's not a leap to suggest that this reeks of corruption and collusion.
UPDATE - The great Brit Hume weighs in on Twitter with an interesting piece of context:
@guypbenson Yes CBS News head @davidgrayrhodes is WH Ben Rhodes's brother, but in his decade+ at Fox News, he was hardly thought a liberal.
— Brit Hume (@brithume) May 11, 2013
So if David Rhodes is a down-the-middle guy, or even has conservative leanings, that changes the calculus a bit. If Politico is right and Attkisson is being targeted by CBS News higher-ups, there are a few possibilities worth considering, given this additional information from Hume: (1) If Attkisson is being punished for politically-motivated reasons, perhaps Rhodes isn't involved. (2) If he is involved, Rhodes' interests may be personal, not political. (3) Attkisson's conduct has crossed some line of professionalism, although I've seen zero evidence that even hints at that conclusion. Finally, there's option (4), wherein Politico got the story wrong, and this is all much ado about nothing. I notice that David Rhodes has just followed me on Twitter, so I will reach out to him and see if we can get to the bottom of this. As I mentioned in the original post, we don't know what the truth is here, but questions abound.
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Why The White House is Dragging Their Feet Re: Benghazi Suspects
by Jack Murphy · May 23, 2013 · Posted In: Special Operations
Some frustrated voices are starting to come out with information about how the FBI has positively identified a number of suspects who are thought to be behind the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi on September 11th of last year. Fox News cites an anonymous Special Operations soldier voicing his frustration, in many ways the frustration of much of America, about the Obama administration’s inaction. The problem is, we don’t know what we don’t know.
Meanwhile in Libya, many associated with the late Gaddafi regime have been dropping like flies. The media has been chalking it up to tribal violence, even as non-Gaddafi regime Libyans are targeted, most of them seeming to be killed while inside their vehicles. Even Ben Qumu, the former Gitmo inmate in charge of Ansar Al-Sharia, the militia primarily behind the Benghazi attack has a bulls eye painted on the back of his head as he dodged an assassination attempt about a month ago. His right hand man, Yahya Abdel Sayed ate it in Sitre just prior to that.
The leaking of the FBI’s five Benghazi suspects is problematic for the Obama administration in a number of ways. For one thing, it puts the suspects within the frame of reference of law enforcement, making it essentially impossible to vector in on the suspects for “targeted killings” or even a low-visibility snatch and grab operation which would deliver them to Gitmo. With the spotlight on them, the only recourse left may be to have them arrested.
But there is another good reason why the Obama administration would prefer to kill those behind Benghazi with a drone strike or by sending in JSOC shooters. As I’ve written previously, the United States had to kill Osama Bin Laden. Bringing him to trial was out of the question because of the things he would begin to talk about when put on the stand. There is no need for conspiracy theory here, just talking about any US support he may have received while fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980′s would have been a massive embarrassment for America and American foreign policy. This is why the Benghazi suspects need to be eliminated from the administration’s perspective, one suspect in particular.
You know where this is going. One of them received covert US support not long after the Libyan Civil War. Apparently he had a fairly cordial relationship with the US government, a quid pro quo arrangement. If the FBI manages to arrest him and bring him to trial it will look like Iran-Contra part two for the Obama administration. That’s why the suspects, along with Ben Qumu will more than likely quietly disappear.
And everyone knows that a post-conflict environment, filled with tribal violence, and an extremely weak transitional government sets the perfect stage for hiding an assassination.
Read more: http://sofrep.com/21072/why-the-white-house-is-dragging-their-feet-re-benghazi-suspects/#ixzz2U8GT8jhg
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The Next Benghazi Scandal
By David Weigel
Posted Thursday, May 23, 2013, at 9:37 AM
Slate.com
Members of the Libyan rapid intervention force unit patrol at a checkpoint on May 16, 2013 in Benghazi following the attack of a police station. Photo by ABDULLAH DOMA/AFP/Getty Images
It's been burbling up from the conservative media for nearly six months, starting with Fox News. Last year, the network's reporter Catherine Herridge reported on a ship that had arrived to Turkey from Libya laden with weapons. Ordnance left unsecured after the fall of Gaddafi was being taken to Syria to overthrow another dictator.
This isn't in much dispute. The dispute, and the theory, is that the weapons used to kill Americans in Benghazi were made available by bungling American gun-runners. That's the theory floated by Roger Simon, who talks to two "Benghazi whistleblowers" (multiplying like rabbits now).
[Chris] Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.
It's a nearly perfect scandal—Fast and Furious plus Benghazi, a sort of Neapolitan sundae of outrage and disgrace. If the anonymous accusers are wrong, we have plenty of other ways to explain the loose weapons in Benghazi and the transfer to Syria. And making it possible for the stray weapons to get to Syria is the sort of thing both parties in Congress largely favor. But the darkest version of the theory is gaining ground on the right.
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Senators: 'What We Do Not Know' About Benghazi
The Weekly Standard ^ | May 23, 2013 | Daniel Halper
Posted on Thursday, May 23, 2013 12:07:52 PM by don-o
Three U.S. senators have identified the missing parts of the response to the Benghazi terror attack. In a statement, Senators Kelly Ayotte, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain list "What We Do Not Know" about Benghazi:
· We do not know whether the President was made aware of the classified cable that, according to published media reports, Ambassador Chris Stevens sent in August 2012, stating that the U.S. Mission in Benghazi could not survive a sustained assault from one or more of the threatening militia groups that were operating in eastern Libya.
· We do not know whether the President’s national security staff made him aware of the attacks on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi that occurred in April and June of last year and the assassination attempt on the British Ambassador in Benghazi around the same time.
· If the President was informed, we do not know what actions, if any, he ordered.
· We do not know who within U.S. Special Operations Command, Africa ordered a U.S. special forces detachment in Tripoli not to go to Benghazi to assist the Americans under attack, and why that “stand down” order was given, as the former Deputy Chief of Mission in Tripoli, Gregory Hicks, testified to Congress.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
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Obama Gives State Dept. Talking Points Editor a Promotion
by Keith Koffler on May 24, 2013, 9:48 am
The State Department spokeswoman who played a pivotal role in deleting portions of the Benghazi talking points has been tapped by President Obama for a plum new post, bagging a nomination to become assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.
Nuland is a career foreign service officer who had held many high-level positions, including under George W. Bush. But her nomination to handle the European portfolio will likely be seen by Republicans as an example of the president flipping the bird their way.
Senate confirmation in the current environment would seem unlikely, at best.
During the process of whittling the original CIA talking points down, a reference to participation in the Benghazi attack by al Qaeda-linked elements was deleted. Nuland had expressed “serious concerns” about mentioning the terrorists. And she also asserted that including references to previous attacks against foreigners in Benghazi “could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings.”
Nuland was particularly aggressive, pursuing the matter until the concerns of her superiors were satisfied.
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Another crony and hack failing her way to the top
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Skip to comments.
The Stingers of Benghazi: Was the U.S. engaged in gun-running?
National Review ^ | 05/24/2013 | Jim Geraghty
Posted on Friday, May 24, 2013 5:47:52 PM by SeekAndFind
Earlier this week, Roger L. Simon of PJ Media broke a story with shocking revelations, contending that slain U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi on September 11 to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups that had been originally provided to them by the U.S. State Department.
Simon cited two former U.S. diplomats:
Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.
Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow [Qaddafi] on the cheap.”
This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda — indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.
A careful review of reports from Libya over the past few years corroborates some parts of that account, but contradicts others:
Some Libyan rebel leaders, including at least one who had spent time in a training camp in Afghanistan and who was in that country in September 2001, specifically asked Western countries to send Stinger missiles.
Qaddafi’s intelligence services believed that the rebels were having the missiles smuggled in over the country’s southern border — but they believed the French were supplying the missiles.
There is no evidence that the U.S. supplied the weapons, but it appears they gave their blessing to a secret Qatari effort to ship arms across Libya’s southern border in violation of a United Nations arms embargo.
Anti-Qaddafi forces also obtained a significant number of anti-aircraft missiles from the regime’s bunkers early in the conflict.
Enough Stinger missiles disappeared from regime stockpiles during the civil war to become a high priority and serious worry for the administration.
(Note that in much of the coverage of Libya, “Stinger” has turned into a catch-all term for any shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missile.)
To save Eric Holder and the Department of Justice the trouble of reading my e-mail or collecting my phone records, all of the information in this report is gathered from public and open sources, both in the U.S. and overseas, and none of it can be considered classified or sensitive.
Before the war, Qaddafi’s regime in Libya possessed more of these kinds of missiles than did any other country except where they’re produced. On April 7, 2011, General Carter Ham, then recently promoted to head of U.S. Africa Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “we do estimate that there were as many as 20,000 of these types of weapons in Libya before the conflict began.”
In March 2011, Ambassador Chris Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the Libyan opposition. He first entered Benghazi on April 5, 2011, joined by a USAID team, while the war was still raging, to meet with rebel leaders.
On March 2, 2011, Mike Elkin of Wired reported as rebel forces cleaned out the Salmani weapons-maintenance depot in Benghazi, and mentioned “30-year-old rockets” and “anti-aircraft weapons.”
Ben Knight, a foreign correspondent with the Australian Broadcasting Company, said on a program a few days later (March 7, 2011) that the rebels had shown him Stinger missiles:
TONY EASTLEY: And I guess on top of that, Ben, the rebels really are not as well armed as the government forces?
BEN KNIGHT: Well, clearly not. . . . What they do have we saw some Stinger missiles today, which are missiles that are capable of locking onto a jet fighter and shooting it down. In fact, they are claiming to have shot down another jet fighter today as well as another helicopter.
By July 2011, C. J. Chivers of the New York Times reported on more anti-aircraft missiles’ being removed from storage bunkers in Ga’a, Libya: On a recent day, 43 emptied wooden crates — long, thin and painted in dark green — had been left behind on the sand inside the entrance. The boxes had not been there during a visit to the same spot a few days before, and the weapons were gone.
The stenciled markings showed each crate had contained a pair of lightweight missiles called SA-7s — early Soviet versions of the same class of weapon as the better known American-made Stingers, which were used by Afghan fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was not clear who had taken them. The rebel guards variously blamed Qaddafi forces and misinformed opposition fighters.
Interviews with anti-Qaddafi leaders at the time indicated that one of their top priorities was obtaining anti-aircraft missiles. In light of the PJ Media report’s claims, one of the most intriguing reports from this time period is a March 11, 2011, Canadian Globe and Mail article that interviewed insurgent leader Abdul Hakim Al-Hasadi:
“We need Stingers,” he said, referring to shoulder-mounted missiles. “We don’t need your stupid words.” . . .
Abdul Hakim Al-Hasadi, 45, [was] recently appointed chief of security in the rebel-controlled town of Darnah. Al-Hasadi says he taught history and geography at a local high school until 1995, when he escaped Libya and spent a few years travelling. He finally settled in Afghanistan in 1999. He acknowledged that he lived in a camp and received training in guerrilla warfare, but would not say who controlled the facility.
The rebel commander said he witnessed the awe-inspiring power of U.S. air strikes when bombs hit Taliban and al-Qaeda positions in 2001. “We felt extreme rage,” he said. “They were killing women and children. It made us hate the United States.”
Hasadi was detained as a hostile combatant by U.S. forces in 2002, according to an interview he gave with an Italian newspaper: “I’ve never been in Guantanamo. I was captured in 2002 in Peshawar, Pakistan, while returning from Afghanistan where I fought against foreign invasion. I was handed over to the Americans, held a few months in Islamabad, delivered to Libya, and released in 2008.”
Hasadi was not the only rebel leader imploring the West for Stinger missiles. A March 23, 2011, Reuters report quoted Fawzi Buktif, described as “an oil project engineer” then running “a training base outside Benghazi,” as saying, “We need Kalashnikovs, stingers, anti-tanks, all types of anti-tanks.”
Despite all the focus on anti-aircraft missiles, the Libyan Air Force ceased to be a significant factor in the war in March 2011. The United Kingdom’s Air Vice Marshal Greg Bagwell declared March 23 that the Libyan Air Force “no longer exists as a fighting force” and that NATO forces now flew over Libyan airspace “with impunity.”
Despite Libya being awash in anti-aircraft missiles, not many were fired at NATO aircraft:
A senior U.S. military officer who follows Libya closely said it was puzzling that there had been so few documented instances in which Libyan loyalist troops launched shoulder-fired missiles at NATO aircraft.
“I’m not sure what that means,” the officer said. “Fewer systems than we thought? Systems are inoperable? Few in Libya know how to operate them?”
Throughout the war, Qaddafi’s regime believed some outside force was supplying the rebels with anti-aircraft weapons. On September 2, 2011, the Wall Street Journal’s Charles Levinson and Margaret Coker managed to obtain the regime’s intelligence files about the rebellion, recovered from the office of Libya’s spy chief and two other security agencies.
By April, the war was expanding and so was the sense of panic inside Tripoli. Mr. Senussi’s [the Libyan spy chief] office did get apparently credible information, but the news was ominous. The reports suggested that the rebels were exploiting the country’s porous southern borders to receive arms and aid.
One memo contained intercepted phone calls between military commanders in Chad who reported Qatari weapons convoys approaching Libya’s southern border with Sudan, apparently intended for anti-[Qaddafi] forces. Another intelligence memo, dated April 4, warned that French weapons, including Stinger antiaircraft missiles and Milan antitank rockets, were making their way to Libyan rebels via Sudan.
French officials declined to comment on the document’s claims. Qatari officials didn’t return email requests for comment.
These Qatari weapons convoys were, in fact approved by the Obama administration, according to the New York Times:
The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats. . . .
The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official.
The Times article stated that “no evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris to the Benghazi attack,” although it’s not clear how anyone could determine that for certain without precise, accurate accounts of the Qatari weapons and the weapons used in the Benghazi attack.
The Obama administration’s approval of these arms shipments almost certainly violated United Nations Security Council Resolution 1970, adopted February 26, 2011, which required all member states to “prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer” of weapons to any party in Libya.
Qaddafi’s forces sought to restock their supply of these missiles during the conflict. In mid July 2011, his regime met with Chinese officials, seeking to purchase $200 million worth of sophisticated weapons, including portable surface-to-air missiles.
Some number of the missiles, perhaps a significant portion, left the country. At least one foreign-intelligence source stated that branches of al-Qaeda were obtaining surface-to-air missiles in Libya. In April 2011, Reuters quoted an Algerian security official who claimed that al-Qaeda was smuggling missiles out of Libya:
The official said a convoy of eight Toyota pick-up trucks left eastern Libya, crossed into Chad and then guy, and from there into northern Mali where in the past few days it delivered a cargo of weapons . . . al Qaeda’s north African wing, known as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), had acquired from Libya Russian-made shoulder-fired Strela surface-to-air missiles known by the NATO designation SAM-7.
In October 2011, a Turkish journalist reported that Egyptian security forces had impeded an effort to smuggle Libyan SA-7 missiles through tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip, and expressed fears that the Kurdish separatist group was attempting to obtain them. Shoulder-mounted missiles were also leaving Libya and ending up in the hands of Somali pirates, according to an April 2012 report:
“We found that Libyan weapons are being sold in what is the world’s biggest black market for illegal gun smugglers, and Somali pirates are among those buying from sellers in Sierra Leone, Liberia and other countries,” said Judith van der Merwe, of the Algiers-based African Centre for the Study and Research on Terrorism.
“We believe our information is credible and know that some of the pirates have acquired ship mines, as well as Stinger and other shoulder-held missile launchers,” Van der Merwe told Reuters on the sidelines of an Indian Ocean naval conference.
By early September 2011, experts on the ground were concluding that “hundreds, if not thousands of surface-to-air missiles were missing,” and Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch’s emergencies director, was telling foreign correspondents that “if these weapons fall into the wrong hands, all of North Africa will be a no-fly zone.”
By late September, the highest levels of the U.S. government began focusing on the disappearing missiles and the threat they presented. Brian Ross of ABC News:
The White House announced today it planned to expand a program to secure and destroy Libya’s huge stockpile of dangerous surface-to-air missiles, following an ABC News report that large numbers of them continue to be stolen from unguarded military warehouses.
Currently the U.S. State Department has one official on the ground in Libya, as well as five contractors who specialize in “explosive ordinance disposal”, all working with the rebel Transitional National Council to find the looted missiles, White House spokesperson Jay Carney told reporters.
On October 23, 2011, Con Coughlin of the Daily Telegraph reported that the Central Intelligence Agency was on the ground in Libya in the effort to recover the missiles:
Since [Qaddafi]’s regime fell in late August teams of CIA officers, supported by other intelligence services such as Britain’s MI6, have been scouring Libya in search of the missing missiles. Their main target is the thousands of shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles [Qaddafi] bought from Moscow during the past decade which, were they to fall into the wrong hands, would pose a massive security risk.
We now know that a significant portion of the U.S. presence in Benghazi was CIA employees. Reuters quoted unidentified government officials who said the annex’s mission was “collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles.”
In February 2012, Andrew Shapiro, then assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, declared in a speech that the U.S. and the new Libyan government had recovered and secured “approximately 5,000” anti-aircraft missiles. In May 2012, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius detailed the claims of two former CIA counterterrorism officers that about 800 of the missiles were in guy, which borders Libya to the southwest, in the hands of an African jihadist group called Boko Haram that’s based in Nigeria.
There is significant reason to believe that both Stevens and the CIA personnel in Benghazi were focused on recovering the missiles in the days leading up to his death on September 11.
After the Benghazi attack, there were public reports of Libyan arms, including these types of anti-aircraft missiles, being smuggled to the Syrian resistance fighting Bashar Assad’s regime.
On September 14, 2012, three days after Stevens was killed, Sheera Frenkel, a correspondent for the Times of London, reported from Antakya, Turkey:
A Libyan ship carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria since the uprising began has docked in Turkey and most of its cargo is making its way to rebels on the front lines, The Times has learnt.
Among more than 400 tonnes of cargo the vessel was carrying were SAM-7 surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), which Syrian sources said could be a game-changer for the rebels.
Frenkel’s report identified the ship’s captain as “Omar Mousaeeb, a Libyan from Benghazi and the head of an organisation called the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support, which is supporting the Syrian uprising.” This was not the first attempt to ship arms from Libya to the Syrian rebels, apparently: In late April, Lebanese authorities seized a large consignment of Libyan weapons, including RPGs and heavy ammunition, from a ship intercepted in the Mediterranean. The ship was attempting to reach the Lebanese port city of Tripoli, a largely Sunni city seen as supportive of the Syrian rebellion against President Assad.
In October 17, 2012, about one month after the ship docked in Turkey, Reuters reported, “Amateur footage of rebels using shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missiles have emerged in recent days.” About a week later, Russia’s top military officer, accused the United States of providing American-made Stinger missiles to the Syrian rebels, a charge the Pentagon and State Department denied.
The American government may not have directed the smuggling of weapons from Libya to Syria through Turkey — but there is evidence to suggest they were aware of it. In June 2012, the New York Times’ Eric Schmitt reported that the CIA had personnel in Syria monitoring, and perhaps assisting, the Syrian rebels’ efforts to obtain weapons in Turkey:
A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.
The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.
The C.I.A. officers have been in southern Turkey for several weeks, in part to help keep weapons out of the hands of fighters allied with Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, one senior American official said.
A March 2013 follow-up report by Schmitt and C. J. Chivers detailed the CIA’s assistance to Arab governments’ efforts to help Syria’s rebels: “The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year.” The vast majority of the cargo flights of arms and equipment went through Esenboga Airport near Ankara, Turkey.
Was Chris Stevens’s “mission in Benghazi” to buy back weapons? Stevens’s planned agenda for his scheduled five-day stay in Benghazi, according to GQ, included plans to “rechristen the U.S.-managed compound ‘an American Space,’ offering local Libyans English lessons and Internet access and show films and stock a library.”
But his final act as ambassador, on the early evening of September 11, 2012, was a meeting with Ali Sait Akin, the Turkish consul general in Benghazi.
For what it’s worth, the Turkish diplomat denies that he discussed arms transfers with Stevens. He told syndicated columnist Diana West that they didn’t talk about “weaponry from the [Qaddafi] stockpiles and where they might be going; the Libyan flagged vessel al-Entisaar which was received in the port of Iskenderun on September 6, 2012; the conflict in Syria and how the opposition to President Assad could be supported by the US and Turkey.”
During former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Rand Paul asked her if the U.S. was involved in any way in the transfer of weapons from Libya to Turkey.
“To Turkey? . . . Nobody’s ever raised that with me,” Clinton responded. When Paul asked whether the annex, the installation to which Americans fled on the night of the Benghazi attack, was involved, she said, “Senator, you’ll have to direct that question to the agency that ran the annex. I do not know.”
Since last autumn, Syria’s rebels have grown bolder in their use of anti-aircraft weapons in that country’s civil war. In late March, Syrian rebels claimed they shot down an Iranian plane landing at Damascus airport that was suspected of carrying weapons and ammunition for the Syrian government. In late April, Russia’s Interfax news agency claimed that two rockets were fired at a Russian charter plane as it flew over Syria. The plane flew from the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to Kazan in Tartarstan, Russia, with 200 passengers on board. On May 8, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the rebels had shot down a fighter jet.
These published reports indicate a sequence of events less incendiary than the one described by Simon’s sources, but still troubling:
During the Libyan civil war, the United States government at least tacitly supported the Qatari effort to arm the rebels, in violation of a U.N. arms embargo. The Obama administration later learned that the weapons were going to Islamists, and acknowledged that the postwar situation of unguarded stockpiles presented an enormous security threat to the region. The CIA was the centerpiece of an effort to recover these weapons, and that was indeed a major component of what the agency was doing in Benghazi in September 2012, in part using the State Department’s facilities. During this time, a large number of weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles, were leaving Libya and arriving in Turkey en route to Syrian rebels — and the CIA had personnel in both countries assigned to monitor and assist the arms shipments.
In his February 2012 speech discussing the effort to recover the anti-aircraft missiles in Libya, Assistant Secretary Shapiro made an unnerving concession: “How many are still missing? The frank answer is we don’t know and probably never will.”
That frank answer probably applies to the weapons flowing into Syria, too.
— Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot on NRO.
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U.S. officials gave instructions for Benghazi Medical Center to use a "John Doe" pseudonym on the death certificate of Ambassador Christopher Stevens after he died of asphyxiation in the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. That's according to a U.S. official speaking on condition of anonymity because the official isn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter. The reason for the pseudonym, says the official, was to avoid drawing undue attention to the importance of the victim as Americans rushed to figure out how to recover Stevens' body and return it to the U.S.
The official provided the most complete accounting yet of Stevens' whereabouts and passing in the eight and a half months since his death.
According to the official, U.S. officials aren't certain to this day whether Stevens was still alive when local Libyans made cell phone video recordings of his body being carried or dragged from the U.S. mission, possibly by looters. And they still don't know exactly who transported him to the Benghazi Medical Center where they say medical personnel attempted resuscitation, unsuccessfully, for about 40 minutes (90 minutes, according to published accounts from a Libyan doctor). When pieced together with previously provided information, this is how the search for Stevens is said to have unfolded, according to the official:
House Oversight chairman subpoenas Benghazi documents
Republicans continue beating Benghazi drum
Benghazi timeline: How the attack unfolded
Full coverage: U.S. Consulate attack in Benghazi
On Tuesday, Sept. 11, around the 10 p.m. hour (4 p.m. ET), State Department Information Officer Sean Smith's body had been pulled from the burned out U.S. mission, but nobody was able to locate Stevens in the smoky building. In the 11 p.m. hour (5 p.m. ET), a group of Libyans, possibly looters, found Stevens and pulled him out of the U.S. mission. Somebody transported him to Benghazi Medical Center where CPR was attempted. Initially, it's believed that doctors did not know who Stevens was. An unidentified man speaking Arabic used a cell phone Stevens had in his possession to call the U.S. embassy in Tripoli (the number was programmed into the phone). He seemed to want Americans to come to the hospital to retrieve Stevens, but U.S. officials were suspicious. The hospital was known to be under the influence of hostile militia and Embassy officials sensed a possible trap, so they opted not to attempt to send a U.S. rescue team now waiting at Benghazi's airport.
A familiar local to whom Americans refer as "Babakar" sent word to the U.S. embassy that Stevens had, indeed, passed away. Babakar sent some of his associates to recover Stevens' body at the hospital. When hospital officials asked what name should be entered on the death certificate, U.S. officials relayed the message to use "John Doe." Babakar's associates eventually transported Stevens' body to the airport where it was turned over to Americans.
Stevens' body was flown from Benghazi to Tripoli, Libya's capital the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 12 and President Obama was informed of the Ambassador's death. That night, a C-17 military aircraft carrying Stevens' body and three other American victims arrived in Ramstein, Germany. On Friday, Sept. 14, the victims' bodies arrived in the U.S. at Andrews Air Force base for a ceremony. Stevens' body was then taken to an FBI facility in Dover, Del., for an autopsy which revealed he died of asphyxia, presumably from smoke inhalation. Officials found no internal damage, no indication of assault and no mistreatment of his body. Stevens was then transported to a funeral home on Saturday, Sept. 15 and cremated, at his family's request.
© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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State Dept. Report Lists 6 Terror Attacks Last Year in Benghazi Before 9/11 Attack
9:28 AM, May 31, 2013 • By JERYL BIER
The State Department released its annual Country Reports on Terrorism 2012 survey on Thursday. The section on the Middle East and North Africa includes a report on terror attacks in Libya. All told, there were eleven terrorism-related attacks last year in Libya prior to the 9/11 attack in Benghazi that took the life of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods. Six of those eleven attacks took place in Benghazi:
• On May 22, assailants launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)’s building in Benghazi. The violent Islamist extremist group Brigades of Captive Omar Abdul Rahman claimed responsibility for the attack. The ICRC evacuated Benghazi in mid-July.
• On June 6, violent extremists attacked the U.S. facilities in Benghazi with an improvised explosive device (IED). The group claimed that the attack was in retaliation for the assassination of Abu-Yahya al-Libi, the second highest ranking leader of al-Qa’ida.
• On June 11, a convoy carrying the British Ambassador to Libya was attacked in Benghazi.
• In August, there was a series of attacks against security personnel and facilities, including the bombing of the Benghazi military intelligence offices on August 1...
• On August 10, Army General Hadiya al-Feitouri was assassinated in Benghazi.
• On August 20, a car belonging to an Egyptian diplomat was blown up near his home in Benghazi.
The report then lists the most infamous attack, as well:
• On September 11, terrorists attacked the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three staff members.
Also noted are five terrorism-related attacks in Benghazi following the 9/11 attack.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/4/al-qaeda-weapons-expert-us-ambassador-libya-killed/?page=all#pagebreak
Wow - if true - its way worse than we ever imagined
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/4/al-qaeda-weapons-expert-us-ambassador-libya-killed/?page=all#pagebreak
Wow - if true - its way worse than we ever imagined
is Obama Impeached yet?
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is Obama Impeached yet?
Unfortunately not - but that does not take away from his derelitction of duty and treason.
Remember - you voted for this communist turd for one reason only - skin color
Congrats asshole - just be glad it was not your family members abandoned in lybia for dead so that this waste of life could go party w jay z and Bey
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Unfortunately not - but that does not take away from his derelitction of duty and treason.
Remember - you voted for this communist turd for one reason only - skin color
Congrats asshole - just be glad it was not your family members abandoned in lybia for dead so that this waste of life could go party w jay z and Bey
lol... ok
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Unfortunately not - but that does not take away from his derelitction of duty and treason.
Remember - you voted for this communist turd for one reason only - skin color
Congrats asshole - just be glad it was not your family members abandoned in lybia for dead so that this waste of life could go party w jay z and Bey
Wtf :D
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Wtf :D
I have no tolerance whatsoever for racist Obama voters who voted and defend him for only one reason and one reason only - the color of his skin.
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http://freebeacon.com/possible-poisoning
BY: Bill Gertz
June 5, 2013 5:00 am
An al Qaeda terrorist stated in a recent online posting that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was killed by lethal injection after plans to kidnap him during the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack in Benghazi went bad.
The veracity of the claim made by Abdallah Dhu-al-Bajadin, who was identified by U.S. officials as a known weapons experts for al Qaeda, could not be determined. However, U.S. officials have not dismissed the terrorist’s assertion.
An FBI spokeswoman indicated the bureau was aware of the claim but declined to comment because of the bureau’s ongoing investigation into the Benghazi attack.
“While there is a great deal of information in the media and on the Internet about the attack in Benghazi, the FBI is not in a position at this time to comment on anything specific with regard to the investigation,” Kathy Wright, the FBI spokeswoman, said.
A State Department spokesman also had no comment.
The FBI is investigating the death of Stevens, State Department information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. They were killed in the attack U.S. officials say was carried out by an al Qaeda-linked group known as Ansar al Sharia.
A State Department Accountability Review Board report and an interim House Republican report on the attack gave no cause of death for Stevens, whose body was recovered by local Libyans in the early morning hours of Sept. 12.
The House report, “Interim Progress Report for the House Republican Conference,” said “Libyan doctors tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate Ambassador Stevens upon his arrival at the hospital.”
To date, no official cause of death for Stevens has been made public, although it was reported that a Libyan doctor who examined Stevens said he died from apparent smoke inhalation and related asphyxiation.
Video and photos of Stevens being handled by a mob in Benghazi were posted on the Internet. It is not clear from the images whether he was dead or alive at the time.
However, according to the March 14 posting on an al Qaeda-linked website, Abdallah Dhu-al-Bajadin, the al Qaeda weapons expert, stated that Stevens was given a lethal injection and that the injection was overlooked during the medical autopsy.
According to Dhu-al-Bajadin, “the plan was based on abduction and exchange of high-level prisoners.”
“However, the operation took another turn, for a reason God only knows, when one of the members of the jihadist cell improvised and followed Plan B,” he wrote on the prominent jihadist web forum Ansar al-Mujahideen Network.
Dhu-al-Bajadin’s claim of assassination also stated that it had been copied to the Ansar al-Mujahidin website from the closed and al Qaeda-accredited website Shumukh al-Islam. That site is only open to members and was initially posted by a member identified as Adnan Shukri for Dhu-al-Bajadin.
The reference to Shumukh al Islam has boosted the credibility of the claim among some U.S. intelligence analysts.
A western intelligence official said Dhu-al-Bajadin is a well-known jihadist weapons experts and a key figure behind a magazine called Al Qaeda Airlines.
According to this official, intelligence analysts believe that Dhu-al-Bajadin’s claim of assassination by lethal injection appears in part aimed at putting pressure on the U.S. government over its handling of the Benghazi attack.
The article did not say what substance was used in the lethal injection. It also stated that the State Department had come under criticism for not providing adequate security in Benghazi prior to the attack.
Dhu-al-Bajadin also said he had further details of the attack and the assassination but would not reveal them in the posting.
The Washington Free Beacon obtained a copy of the translation of Dhu-al-Bajadin’s posting in Arabic.
The article stated that use of lethal injection is done “more than one place in the human body that autopsy doctors ignore when they see that the symptoms are similar to another specific and common illness.”
“Anyone who studied the art of silent assassination that spies applied during the Cold War would easily identify these parts of the body,” he said.
Dhu-al-Bajadin also stated that he was discussing the assassination of Stevens’ death months later because “the cell” behind “the infiltrative and secret operation is now completely safe from intelligence bureaus.”
The FBI last month disclosed it was searching for five men linked to the Sept. 11 Benghazi attack and posted video and photos of three men wanted in connection with the attacks.
“The grainy still images, taken from surveillance video, show three men who may be able to provide information to help the FBI’s larger probe into the attacks that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya,” the FBI said in a statement.
The FBI opened a webpage in November as part of an effort to solicit information on the attack.
Dhu-al-Bajadin did not disclose details of the “turn” in events that prompted Stevens’ assassination. However, he may have been referring to the armed security team encountered by the terrorists who went to the diplomatic compound from a nearby CIA office within 25 minutes of the start of the attack. The security team killed or wounded many of the dozens of terrorists at the diplomatic compound, U.S. officials have said.
The House report said the security team “repelled sporadic gunfire and [rocket-propelled grenade] fire and assembled all other U.S. personnel at the facility. Officers retrieved the body of Mr. Smith but did not find Ambassador Stevens.”
The Obama administration is under increasing pressure from congressional Republicans over its handling of the Benghazi attack. Several congressional committees are investigating the attack.
The White House has declined so far to answer many questions about its response to the attack, such as what was the president’s response to it, and why no military rescue operation was ordered.
Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before Congress earlier this year that the president designated authority for handling the attack to them.
The attack took place during the final weeks of Obama’s presidential campaign and it is likely that political campaign and White House officials sought to play down the attack to avoid upsetting his reelection bid.
Both Panetta and Dempsey said there wasn’t enough time to mount a rescue operation, as military units were not close enough to respond in time.
However, critics have said the assessment by Panetta and Dempsey could not be accurate since they could not have known the full scope of the terrorist attack at the time or how long it would continue.
Dhu-al-Bajadin concluded the message by warning that “two jihad fronts” are now open in the Levant and in Africa and warned “we are preparing to open two other fronts soon.”
A U.S. official said Dhu-al-Bajadin is considered a serious threat and in earlier writings indicated he had access to inside information from al Qaeda.
Dhu-al Bajadin claimed in July 2012 in another online article that al Qaeda was behind the killing of Gareth Williams, an employee of Britain’s electronic spy service GCHQ who was working for the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. Williams was found dead in suspicious circumstances at a safe house in Pimlico, London, Aug. 23, 2010. His death was ruled “unnatural” and likely criminal related.
On U.S. intelligence reports and testimony that al Qaeda is severely weakened since 2001, Dhu-al-Bajadin stated “within months the world will be stunned by the opening of a new front in the global war between the Islamic ummah [Muslims worldwide] and the Zionist-Crusader campaign.”
“And if your reports state that al Qaeda is dangerous, we will strike you on your own land with operations that will awe your security experts,” he stated. “We will be more dangerous than you might expect.”
The U.S. Northern Command recently warned that terrorists were planning an attack on the United States, but details of the warning could not be learned.
The posting by Dhu-al-Bajadin also said the next issue of the Al Qaeda Airlines magazine would be published.
That issue appeared online weeks later in April and provided detailed plans on how to produce and disperse deadly concentrations of hydrogen cyanide in public places. It called the improvised cyanide-producing device “Al Mubtakar al-Farid,” Arabic for “The unique innovation.”
The instructions were issued in both English and Arabic and urged terrorists to conduct “lone wolf” attacks using the chemical weapons.
The al Qaeda publication Inspire was used by the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects in learning how to fashion the pressure-cooker explosives used in the April attack on the sporting event.
The latest Al Qaeda Airlines issue stated that the terror group once planned to use an improvised poison gas attack on the New York subway but the attack was canceled at the last minute.
The article suggested that terrorists pose as maintenance workers and release cyanide gas through the ventilation system of office buildings or by remote detonation of gas-filled bombs.
Suggested targets included nightclubs, schools, churches and youth clubs, and large office buildings.
The United States was mentioned as a prime target for the attacks. The article also included images of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Islamist shooter charged in the Fort Hood massacre.
Dhu-al-Bajadin has said the Al Qaeda Airlines publication is not solely focused on aviation but was chosen as a way to instill fear in the enemy.
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I have no tolerance whatsoever for racist Obama voters who voted and defend him for only one reason and one reason only - the color of his skin.
lol ok
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I have no tolerance whatsoever for racist Obama voters who voted and defend him for only one reason and one reason only - the color of his skin.
how many Obama voters do you actually know and did they all tell you they voted for Obama due to their "racism" or did you just divine that bit of info
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I have no tolerance whatsoever for racist Obama voters who voted and defend him for only one reason and one reason only - the color of his skin.
I dont either.
But i dont think there is as many of those that you think.