This Book Is Worth Reading

On October 1, The Center for Security Policy posted a brief book review of The Arab Spring Ruse: How the Muslim Brotherhood Duped Washington in Libya and Syria, by investigative journalist John Rossomando.

The book review includes the following:

The new book, The Arab Spring Ruse: How the Muslim Brotherhood Duped Washington in Libya and Syria, by investigative journalist John Rossomando and published by the Center for Security Policy offers a definitive account ̶ derived from interviews with Syrian and Libyan opposition figures and a top Obama administration official, Hillary Clinton’s emails, social media posts, Arabic-language news accounts, and never before reported documents ̶ of the foreign policy disaster in Syria and Libya that placed the U.S. government on the same side as al-Qaida-aligned jihadists. Those countries have never recovered from these policies that led to the rise of ISIS and still on-going civil wars.

Now-familiar names, such as Antony Blinken, William Burns, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Lloyd Austin, make appearances as Rossomando details how the Obama administration opened the door to Muslim Brotherhood propagandists secretly aligned themselves with pro al-Qaida jihadists in Syria and Libya.

“With the unfortunate collapse of Afghanistan, this book could not be timelier,” said Kyle Shideler, the Center’s Director of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, “The Biden administration’s reliance on cooperation with the Taliban, falsely characterized as growing in moderation, is a mirror image of the failed Libya and Syria policies that John extensively documents.”

The Arab Spring Ruse details how liberal Arab opposition figures were snubbed in favor of the hardcore pro-jihadist figures, who allied with al-Qaida and ISIS, while being sold to Washington as “moderates.”

Emails to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal highlight how the Obama-Biden Administration knew about links between Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Libya and Egypt and al-Qaida figures during the so-called Arab Spring, but chose to support jihadist rebels anyway.

The book also details the role of U.S.-based Muslim Brotherhood-aligned leaders in influencing U.S. policy towards Syria and Libya. Operating out of a Northern Virginia mosque famous for being led by Al Qaida cleric Anwar Awlaki and hosting two of the 9/11 hijackers, Islamist leaders created lobby groups that targeted Libya and Syria and served as a conduit to deceptively pass jihadists off as moderate supporters of democracy and human rights.

The Biden administration is simply the third term of the Obama administration and includes and will amplify all of the failures of the Obama administration. We can expect to see massive government overreach and a loss of many of the freedoms we take for granted over the next three years.

Looking For Your Keys On The Wrong Side Of The Street

There is an old joke about a man walking around under a street light who was asked by a passerby what he was doing. The man replied that he was looking for his car keys that had fallen out of his pocket when he got out of the car. The passerby pointed out that the car was parked on the other side of the street and asked why the man was looking on the wrong side of the street, The man replied, “The light is better over here.” That is what is currently happening at the United Nations.

Yesterday The Washington Examiner reported that the United Nations Human Rights Council is holding an “urgent” debate on police brutality and systemic racism.

The article reports:

While the UNHRC president says the debate is not just about the United States, it’s clear the U.S. is the primary subject as the killing of George Floyd was the catalyst for the meeting. And it’s clear that the conclusion the council will reach is a sham.

The article notes some of the history of the United Nations Human Rights Council:

The council is an abomination because most of the countries it should be examining are sitting members of the body. China and Cuba were members until the end of last year. Qatar, which has been using slave labor to build stadiums for the 2022 World Cup, is a sitting member. Nicolas Maduro’s socialist dictatorship didn’t stop Venezuela from becoming a member this year, nor did Libya’s human rights abuses or Mauritania’s slavery.

There’s a reason the Human Rights Council was the original whipping boy of U.N. critics before the World Health Organization was revealed to be a Chinese puppet. “The Human Rights Council is a poor defender of human rights, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said when the U.S. withdrew from the council in 2018, “But worse than that, the Human Rights Council has become an exercise in shameless hypocrisy with many of the world’s worst human rights abuses going ignored.”

The U.S. was right in its assessment in 2018, and the show trial that council members will make of the U.S. won’t mean much of anything. But in principle, the Human Rights Council’s existence is just an exercise in appeasing real human rights abusers. Between this and the World Health Organization’s debacle over the coronavirus and China, it’s time for Americans to start considering real alternatives to the U.N.

I guess the way to avoid criticism by the United Nations for civil rights violations is to actually be a member of the Human Rights Council. At least that is the way it has worked so far.

Misplaced Concern For Human Rights

CBN News is reporting today that the United Nations has released a list of companies that have businesses in areas Israel captured as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War.

The article reports:

The list was designed to punish more than a hundred companies doing business in east Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights. Israel froze ties with the council’s leader, accusing the office of serving the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanction) campaign.

Reaction came quickly after the report’s release and US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) accused the council of persecuting Israel while protecting the world’s worst tyrants. He called on the body to “investigate the crimes of its own members instead of obsessing over the Jewish state.”

The UN has a history of actions against Israel. The United Nations Human Rights Council was created in 2006. Since then, it has issued 45 resolutions against Israel, about 45% of all country-specific resolutions issued. The United Nations Human Rights Council includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Qatar, Venezuela, and Libya. None of these countries are stellar examples of human rights.

The article notes:

After the release of the database Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to boycott those who boycott Israel, calling the Human Rights Council a “biased body that is devoid of influence.” His political rival, Benny Gantz, also condemned the publication, calling it a “dark day” for human rights.

Jason Greenblatt, one of the architects of President Trump’s Middle East peace plan, told CBN News the public should be pro-active against the boycott movement.

“First of all, shame on them. You know, they were working on this, they held it back and now after a peace plan is launched they go ahead and do that, shame on the Human Rights Council. The UN is a terrible place for Israel. I would actually encourage all of your viewers to write letters to [UN Secretary-General António Guterres] and protest that,” said Greenblatt.

…Ironically, any resulting boycotts would likely hurt Palestinians the most. For example, CBN News has reported how international pressure forced the SodaStream company to leave Mishor Adumim and move to Israel costing many of the 500 Palestinian employees their jobs.

“The Palestinians certainly stand to suffer if these types of measures are put in place. It will harm companies that employ Palestinians; it will harm companies that provide goods and services to Palestinians,” NGO Monitor’s Yona Schiffmiller told CBN News.

He also said the majority of the list’s information came from BDS linked groups.

“I think it’s also important to note that the activities these companies are being targeted for are completely legitimate. There is no international standard that bars business activity in occupied territories or in settlements,” Schiffmiller explained.

“Many of the companies that we’re talking about are conducting activities that are outlined in the Oslo Accords. So, these are internationally recognized agreements between Israel and the Palestinians that the UN is now completely disregarding by putting out this list,” he concluded.

The article concludes with actions that anyone can take to fight this:

Just last year, 600 businessmen and women from more than 50 countries will come to Israel to connect with and invest in Israeli business leaders for the second-annual ARISE conference.

“We’re really tackling some of the greatest crises around the world. And so, we’ve invited them to connect with Israeli businesses and meet face to face and create those connections and transactions that will help bring Israeli innovation to the world,” ARISE Founder and President Adv. Calev Myers told CBN News.

Over the last few years, various states in the US have passed laws against boycotting Israel. Schiffmiller said the international community is within its rights to stop supporting a UN body that’s potentially harming these companies.

STOP THE BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL! 
Sign the Petition
Text “STOPBDS” to 41-444
VISIT: CBN.COM/STOPBDS

Please do.

Why Does The Establishment (Republicans and Democrats) Hate Donald Trump?

Yesterday Victor Davis Hanson posted an article at American Greatness titled, “Why Do They Hate Him So?” The article analyzes the reasons that President Trump is opposed by both the political left and the establishment right.

The article states:

Again, why the unadulterated hatred? For the small number of NeverTrumpers, of course, Trump’s crudity in speech and crassness in manner nullify his accomplishments: the unattractive messenger has fouled an otherwise tolerable message.

While they recognize in the abstract that the randy JFK, the repugnant LBJ, and the horny Bill Clinton during their White House tenures were far grosser in conduct than has been Donald Trump, they either assume presidential ethics should have evolved or they were not always around to know of past bad behavior first hand, or believe Trump’s crude language is worse than prior presidents’ crude behavior in office.

The article continues:

Had Donald Trump in his first month as president declared that he was a centrist Republican —as many suspicious Never Trumpers predicted that he would, true to past form—and promoted cap-and-trade and solar and wind federal subsidies, tabled pipeline construction and abated federal leasing for gas and oil production, stayed in the Iran nuclear deal and Paris Climate Accord, appointed judges in the tradition of John Paul Stevens and David Souter, praised the “responsible” Palestinian leaders, pursued “comprehensive immigration reform” as a euphemism for blanket amnesties, then Trump would be treated largely as a George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush: hated, of course, but not obsessively so.

More importantly, had Trump just collapsed or stagnated the economy, as predicted by the likes of Paul Krugman and Larry Summers, he would now be roundly denounced, but again not so vilified, given his political utility for the Left in 2020 as a perceived Herbert Hoover-esque scapegoat.

Had Trump kept within the media and cultural sidelines by giving interviews to “60 Minutes,” speaking at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, bringing in a few old Republican hands to run the staff or handle media relations like a David Gergen or Andrew Card, Trump would have been written off as a nice enough dunce.

But Trump did none of that. So, the hatred of the media, the Left, the swamp, and the celebrity industry is predicated more on the successful Trump agenda. He is systematically undoing what Barack Obama wrought, in the manner Obama sought to undo with his eight years the prior eight years of George W. Bush.

But whereas the Obama economy stagnated and his foreign policy was seen by adversaries and rivals as a rare occasion to recalibrate the world order at American’s expense, Trump mostly did not fail—at least not yet. We are currently in an economic boom while most of the world economy abroad is inert. Had the economy just crashed as predicted, the Trump agenda would have been discredited and he would be written off a pitiful fool rather than an existential monster.

Again, hatred arises at what Trump did even more than what he says or how he says it.

The obvious conclusion:

The bipartisan Washington establishment? If an outsider Manhattan wheeler-dealer without military or political experience can at last call an appeased China to account, can avoid a Libyan fiasco, can acknowledge that America is tired of a 18-year slog in Afghanistan when others would not, or believes ISIS thrived as a result of prior arcane restrictive U.S. rules of engagement—and he is proven largely right—then what does that say about the credentialed experts who dreamed up the bipartisan conventional wisdom that with a few more concessions China would eventually become Palo Alto or that Libya would bloom at the heart of the Arab Spring?

The Left detests Trump for a lot of reasons besides winning the 2016 election and aborting the progressive project. But mostly they hate his guts because he is trying and often succeeding to restore a conservative America at a time when his opponents thought that the mere idea was not just impossible but unhinged.

And that is absolutely unforgivable.

Be prepared for a very nasty year before the election in 2020. There are a lot of very unhinged people in politics and in the media.

Some Random Thoughts On The Troop Withdrawal

According to conservative news sources, the troop withdrawal from the Turkish border is simply moving fifty troops–it is not a withdrawal. I wish it were a withdrawal, we are not currently capable of fighting a war right now–we are unable to unite and focus on the job at hand.

Yesterday The Federalist posted an article about the dust-up.

The article notes:

Congress is the institution vested with the power to declare wars, to debate where we send troops, and decide which conflicts are funded. Presidents have been ignoring this arrangement, abuse authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs), and imbue themselves with the power to engage in conflicts wherever they like, without any coherent endgame, and without any buy-in from Congress.

Congress, in turn, has shown no interest in genuinely challenging executive power, because its members are far more concerned with political self-preservation. Ignoring abuse shields them from tough choices and ensuing criticism—even as they use war as a partisan cudgel.

Even if you don’t believe all these conflicts rise to an Article I declaration, and I don’t, the more accountability there is in foreign entanglements the better. Right now we have little genuine debate or consensus building—in a nation that already exhibits exceptionally little interest in foreign policy—regarding the deployment of our troops, almost always in perpetuity, around the world.

It’s a bipartisan problem. Barack Obama, whose political star rose due to his opposition to the Iraq war, was perhaps our worst offender, circumventing Congress and relying on a decade-old AUMF (authorizations for the use of military force), which he invoked 19 times during his presidency, to justify a half-hearted intervention against ISIS (not al-Qaeda) in Syria (not Afghanistan.)

The article notes that military overreach is a problem in both parties:

It’s a bipartisan problem. Barack Obama, whose political star rose due to his opposition to the Iraq war, was perhaps our worst offender, circumventing Congress and relying on a decade-old AUMF, which he invoked 19 times during his presidency, to justify a half-hearted intervention against ISIS (not al-Qaeda) in Syria (not Afghanistan.)

Trump could bomb Iran tomorrow, use Obama’s reasoning, and have a far stronger legal defense for his actions.

It was also Obama who joined Europeans in the failed intervention in Libya, where he worked under NATO goals rather than the United States law. There was hardly a peep from Democrats fretting over the corrosion of the Constitution.

American would function much more efficiently if our Congressmen and President would simply follow the U.S. Constitution. At this point I am not sure many of them have read it–although they did take an oath to uphold it.

I’m Not Sure If This Will Be The End Of This Story

Yesterday Mark Hemingway posted an article at Real Clear Investigations about an investigation into a scheme involving Hillary Clinton’s pal Sidney Blumenthal and his associates to profit from the deposing of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

The article reports:

Records recently posted online by the FBI indicate that it did little to investigate allegations from private sources connected to Republicans about a scheme in which associates of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to exploit their connection to her to profit from the turmoil in Libya in 2011.

The FBI received the documents in June 2016, around the same time it launched an exhaustive, three-year investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia based, in part, on information from private sources connected to Democrats that in the main would prove to be false – the Steele dossier.

The bureau’s different responses to these documents also came during the same period when FBI Director James B. Comey controversially cleared Clinton, in his first of two exonerations, of criminal wrongdoing in the bureau’s probe of her unauthorized and insecure email setup.\

The documents, quietly released as part of the FBI’s case files for the “Midyear Exam,” its code name for the Clinton email investigation, revive a lingering mystery from Clinton’s tenure as the nation’s chief diplomat: Why did Sidney Blumenthal, the former journalist and Bill Clinton White House aide, send her a series of detailed memos and reports about Libya beginning in 2011?

The documents offer an answer. They allege that Blumenthal sent the emails as a “quid pro quo” to free up classified State Department financial intelligence to help Libya recover as much as $66 billion spirited offshore by slain strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

Out of that, Blumenthal and associates stood to gain a brokers’ cut of perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.

The private Libya inquiry leaves important issues unsettled. The documents do not include emails or other original source material to support the allegations within. While claiming to possess evidence that Blumenthal and his associates had contracts and offshore accounts to repatriate the money, the documents say “no concrete evidence” was found suggesting Clinton acted to support the effort.

Yet if verified, the files might shed light on why Clinton kept her emails, tens of thousands of which have gone missing, out of normal government communication channels.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It asks many questions about why the FBI followed up on an investigation on Russian collusion when they knew that some of the leads they had were false and didn’t follow up on this investigation.

Hopefully, as the FBI becomes less political (which may or may not be happening), some of the loose ends left loose by the Obama administration will be revisited.

Sometimes It’s Hard To Figure Out Who Your Friends Actually Are

There has been a civil war going on in Libya since 2014. When Muammar Gaddafi was killed in 2011, there was a revolution for less than a year, and a government was established. A new government was elected in 2014, but there were controversies surrounding that election. There has been a civil war in Libya ever since.

On June 28th, The New York Times reported the following:

Libyan government fighters discovered a cache of powerful American missiles, usually sold only to close American allies, at a captured rebel base in the mountains south of Tripoli this week.

The article notes that America supports the current government of Libya. Gen. Khalifa Hifter and his forces are waging a military campaign to overthrow the current government and take over Libya. So where did the American weapons, to be used against a government America supports, come from?

The article notes:

Markings on the missiles’ shipping containers indicate that they were originally sold to the United Arab Emirates, an important American partner, in 2008.

If the Emirates transferred the weapons to General Hifter, it would likely violate the sales agreement with the United States as well as a United Nations arms embargo.

Both the State Department and Defense Department are investigating how the weapons wound up in Libya.

The article continues:

“We take all allegations of misuse of U.S. origin defense articles very seriously,” a State Department official said in a statement. “We are aware of these reports and are seeking additional information. We expect all recipients of U.S. origin defense equipment to abide by their end-use obligations.”

The United States supports United Nations-led efforts to broker a peaceful solution to the Libyan crisis, the official added.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense declined to comment further on the matter.

The United Arab Emirates ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, declined to answer questions about the provenance of the missiles.

Finally, the article notes some interesting contradictions in those who support of the current regime and the rebels:

When General Hifter started his assault on Tripoli on April 4, in the face of much international opposition, the Emiratis continued to support him. They supplied a Russian-made surface-to-air missile system, Chinese-made Wing Loong combat drones and Emirati drones, said a senior Western official with knowledge of the arms trade.

Jordan, another American ally to side with General Hifter, sent a Jordanian-made anti-tank system known as Nashshab, the official said.

Turkey, a regional rival of the United Arab Emirates, intervened on the other side of the fight, sending combat drones and armored vehicles to help the United Nations-backed government in Tripoli.

The United States supports the Tripoli government, which it helped install. However, President Trump appeared to endorse General Hifter and his military drive after the two men spoke by telephone in April, hailing his “significant role in fighting terrorism.”

Other American officials later rowed back that position by stressing American support for the United Nations-led political process.

The foreign interventions, which flout a United Nations embargo on all arms sales to Libya, highlight how the conflict set off by the ouster of Libya’s longtime dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, in 2011 has partly devolved into a proxy conflict between rival regional powers.

I would just like to note that civil wars are nasty, and it is foolish for outsiders to get involved in them. It really doesn’t sound as if the current government in Libya is the one we should be supporting.

Walter Jones Will Be Missed

Walter Jones was my Congressman. I met him on various occasions. He was a humble man who worked hard to represent the people of eastern North Carolina. I know of more than one instance when he went out of his way to help someone cut through the red tape of government to get help with an issue.

Tonight The Daily Caller posted an article about his death.

The article notes:

Jones, who represented his North Carolina district for over 20 years, was fighting off several illnesses over the last few months, according to Fox News, and was granted a leave of absence in late 2018 after missing several votes on the floor.

A strong supporter of the U.S. Marines, Jones previously served in the North Carolina General Assembly. His district has numerous military bases, and while he initially supported the war in Iraq, he eventually sided with Democrats calling for the withdrawal of troops from the country. 

…Back in 2011, Jones was one of 10 members of Congress to file a lawsuit against President Obama in an effort to stop the U.S. from sending troops to Libya, calling the U.S. bombing an “abuse of power.”

“Libya had done nothing to America,” Jones had said. “I realize they’ve got an evil leader, Qaddafi, but still, you don’t go around the world attacking countries because they have an evil leader.”

Any time a constituent spoke with Walter Jones, he told them how concerned he was about the budget deficit. He would not vote yes on any bill that increased the deficit. He was a man who represented the people in his district well and stuck to his principles.

The Truth Is Still Leaking Out

Yesterday Fox News posted an article about the cover-up by the State Department of both information surrounding Hillary Clinton’s private server and information regarding the attack at Benghazi.

The article reports:

In a combative exchange at a hearing Friday in Washington, D.C., a federal judge unabashedly accused career State Department officials of lying and signing “clearly false” affidavits to derail a series of lawsuits seeking information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth also said he was “shocked” and “dumbfounded” when he learned that FBI had granted immunity to former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills during its investigation into the use of Clinton’s server, according to a court transcript of his remarks.

“I had myself found that Cheryl Mills had committed perjury and lied under oath in a published opinion I had issued in a Judicial Watch case where I found her unworthy of belief, and I was quite shocked to find out she had been given immunity in — by the Justice Department in the Hillary Clinton email case,” Lamberth said during the hearing.

The Department of Justice’s Inspector General (IG), Michael Horowitz, noted in a bombshell report in June that it was “inconsistent with typical investigative strategy” for the FBI to allow Mills to sit in during the agency’s interview of Clinton during the email probe, given that classified information traveled through Mills’ personal email account. “[T]here are serious potential ramifications when one witness attends another witness’ interview,” the IG wrote.

The article notes that the Judge did not know that Cheryl Mills had been granted immunity.

The article continues:

The transparency group Judicial Watch initially sued the State Department in 2014, seeking information about the response to the Benghazi attack after the government didn’t respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Other parallel lawsuits by Judicial Watch are probing issues like Clinton’s server, whose existence was revealed during the course of the litigation.

The State Department had immediately moved to dismiss Judicial Watch’s first lawsuit on a motion for summary judgment, saying in an affidavit that it had conducted a search of all potentially relevant emails in its possession and provided them. The affidavit noted that some more documents and emails could be forthcoming.

But Lamberth denied the request to dismiss the lawsuit at the time — and on Friday, he said he was happy he did, charging that State Department officials had intentionally misled him because other key documents, including those on Clinton’s email server, had not in fact been produced.

“It was clear to me that at the time that I ruled initially, that false statements were made to me by career State Department officials, and it became more clear through discovery that the information that I was provided was clearly false regarding the adequacy of the search and this – what we now know turned out to be the Secretary’s email system,” Lamberth said Friday.

Please follow the link to read the entire article, which includes the transcript of the hearing.

Be Careful Who You Rescue

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about some recent events on an Italian ship that rescued a group of migrants off the coast of Libya.

The article reports:

The Italian ship Vos Thalassa rescued 67 migrants, including six children, off the coast of Libya on Sunday while responding to a distress call.

But when the Italian crew turned to to meet the Libyan coast guard the migrants threatened to behead the Italian crew.

The Italian government then intervened to rescue the crew of the rescue ship.

The report from Euronews quoted in the article states:

However, international shipping company Vroon, which operates Vos Thalassa, an oil rig supply vessel, told Euronews that the ship “never requested to enter an Italian port or even Italian territorial waters.”

‘Severely outnumbered’
Vroon said that when the vessel turned to meet with the Libyan coast guard to transfer the migrants, they “started to threaten the crew, surrounding and pushing them and making ‘cut your throat’ gestures.”

“Because of these threats the vessel returned to its position and reported this situation to the MRCC [Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre] in Rome.”

The shipping company said being “severely outnumbered on board a merchant vessel by an angry crowd that has very little to lose is very frightening”.

“We are very proud of the professionalism of our crew in these very challenging circumstances.”

There are differences between cultures. We need to consider that when dealing with migrants.

Lied To Again

The Federalist Papers reported today:

Maybe Barack Obama thinks if he says something that’s completely false, perhaps they’ll believe it if he tweets it.

So speaking to troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, when Obama said “Over the last eight years, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland,”

Sorry, that is a lie.

The article includes the list of attacks during Obama’s Presidency:

Little Rock, Arkansas, June 1, 2009. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad shot and murdered one soldier, Army Pvt. William Andrew Long, and injured another, Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, at a military recruiting station in Little Rock. Muhammad reportedly converted to Islam in college and was on the FBI’s radar after being arrested in Yemen–a hotbed of radical Islamic terrorism–for using a Somali passport, even though he was a U.S. citizen. In a note to an Arkansas judge, Muhammad claimed to be a member of al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, the terror group’s Yemen chapter.

Fort Hood, Texas, November 5, 2009. Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot up a military base in Fort Hood and murdered 14 people. Hasan was in contact with al-Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki prior to the attack and shouted “Allahu Akbar!” as he fired upon the soldiers on the Fort Hood base. After being sentenced to death, Hasan requested to join ISIS while on death row. It took six years for Obama to acknowledge the shooting as a terror attack instead of “workplace violence.”

Frankfurt, Germany, March 2, 2011. Arid Uka, a Kosovo Albanian Muslim, shot and murdered two U.S. airmen who were headed to fight in Afghanistan at a Frankfurt airport and injured two others. Uka was sentenced to life in prison and is believed to have been radicalized through jihadist propaganda on the Internet, as his Facebook page was laced with jihadist statements. He is also believed to have acted alone.

Benghazi, Libya, September 11, 2012. Ansar al-Sharia, an Islamic terror group, attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and murdered Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed the attack on a video, a blatant lie.

Boston, Massachusetts, April 15, 2013. Tamerlan and Dhozkar Tsarnaev set off two bombs at the 2013 Boston marathon, killing three and injuring over 260 people. The Tsarnaev brothers later shot and murdered Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier. The Tsarnaev brothers were self-radicalized through online jihadist propaganda and through a mosque with ties to al-Qaeda.

London, Britain, May 22, 2013. An off-duty British Army solider was murdered by Islamic fundamentalists.

Brussels, Belgium, May 24, 2014. Islamic terrorist Mehdi Nemmouche murdered three people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

Hamas starting war with Israel, July 8, 2015. Islamic terror group Hamas started a war with Israel, launching rockets into the Jewish state.

Moore, Oklahoma, September 24, 2014. Alton Nolen beheaded a woman, Colleen Huff, at a Vaughan Foods plant and stabbed and injured another person. While Nolen’s motives are unclear, he appears to have been another radicalized Muslim who was obsessed with beheadings.

Queens, New York, October 23, 2014. Zale Thompson, another self-radicalized Muslim, injured two police officers with a hatchet before being shot dead by other cops. Thompson reportedly indoctrinated himself with ISIS, al-Qaeda and al-Shabab–a Somali jihadist terror group–websites and was a lone wolf attacker.

Brooklyn, New York, December 20, 2014. Ismaayil Brinsley shot and murdered two police officers execution-style and his Facebook page featured jihadist postings and had ties to a terror-linked mosque.

Paris, France, January 7, 2015. Two Islamic terrorists murdered 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine that had published cartoons mocking Mohammed. Al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Paris, France, January 9, 2015. A gunman who pledged allegiance to ISIS held people in a kosher supermarket hostage and killed four of them.

Copenhagen, Denmark, February 23, 2015. A gunman who swore loyalty to the leader of ISIS opened fire at a free speech forum and at people outside a synagogue. The terrorist murdered two people.

Garland, Texas, May 3, 2015. Two gunmen shot up the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, where a Mohammed cartoon contest was taking place, and were killed by a police officer. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.

Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, France, June 26, 2015. A French ISIS fanatic beheaded his boss.

Chattanooga, Tennessee, July 16, 2015. Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot and killed four Marines and a sailor at a military base in Chattanooga and was believed to have been inspired by ISIS.

Palestinian Intifada against Jews, September 13, 2015. A wave of Palestinian terror attacks toward Jews in Israel began in September, which only worsened after the incitement from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Paris, France, November 13, 2015. ISIS launched a massive, coordinated terror attack in the city of Paris that resulted in at least 129 dead and 352 people injured.

San Bernardino, California, December 14, 2015. Two radical Islamists, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, shot and murdered 14 people and injured 22 others at an office holiday party.

Brussels, Belgium, March 22, 2016. ISIS set off bombs and gunfire at a Brussels’s city airport and a subway station, killing 30 people and injuring at least 230 people.

The article points out:

In fact, under Barack Obama, worldwide terrorism deaths have risen four-fold.

Obviously, President Obama is not solely responsible for the increase of terrorism around the world, but there is an aspect of this that needs to be looked at. America has been looked to as a force that kept law and order around the world. It was understood that if a country was consistently causing trouble, they might experience the wrath of America on some level. In 1986, the United States bombed Libya in response to the terrorist bombing of a Berlin discotheque and other terrorist attacks Libya had been involved in. There was a price to be paid for engaging in terrorism. The attack had only a limited effect on the terrorism activities of Libya, but the message was sent that America would attack states that sponsored terrorism. Unfortunately that has not been the case during the Obama Administration. He has made it possible for billions of dollars to flow to Iran, a country that routinely funds terrorism and arms America’s enemies in the Middle East.

Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union partially because he was considered a cowboy, and the Russians feared him.

According to a recent article at RightWingGranny, President George W. Bush had a similar effect:

According to one of the world’s most deadly and infamous terrorists, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, President George W. Bush wiped out plans for other imminent attacks by quickly invading Afghanistan after 9/11/2001. 

According to a new book detailed by The Federalist and former Bush staffer Marc Thiessen, KSM admitted during enhanced interrogation the President’s swift “shock-and-awe” action not only thwarted plans for follow up attacks to 9/11, but changed Al Qaeda‘s entire strategy. 

…Far from trying to draw us in, KSM said that al-Qaeda expected the United States to respond to 9/11 as we had the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut — when, KSM told Mitchell, the United States ‘turned tail and ran.’

‘Then he looked at me and said, ‘How was I supposed to know that cowboy George Bush would announce he wanted us ‘dead or alive’ and then invade Afghanistan to hunt us down?’’ Mitchell writes. ‘KSM explained that if the United States had treated 9/11 like a law enforcement matter, he would have had time to launch a second wave of attacks.’ He was not able to do so because al-Qaeda was stunned ‘by the ferocity and swiftness of George W. Bush’s response.’

I do not support overseas fighting unless it is absolutely necessary, but those who criticize President Bush for his handling of Iraq and Afghanistan forget that there was no follow-up attack to 9/11. They also forget that it was President Obama who prematurely withdrew troops from Iraq, allowing for the growth of ISIS.

I am hoping that Donald Trump will be a President in the mold of President Reagan–not anything like President Obama.

 

 

Before You Buy Into The Accusation, Take A Look At The Accuser

I suspect that if you are reading this, you are as tired of this presidential election as I am. However, the media (and the Clinton campaign) have said so many outlandish things about Donald Trump, I feel obligated to respond to at least some of them. I would like to point out that Donald Trump has been in the public eye for at least thirty years, and although he has never been a poster child for modesty, humility, and Puritanism, he has had a rather reasonable reputation until he decided to run against Hillary Clinton. That alone is cause for reflection.

The latest Democratic talking point is that America will end if Donald Trump is elected–the seas will begin the rise again, we will bomb everyone, and the world will hate us. Pick any major media and you will find a story about one of the above. Well, it’s time to point out the background of one of the accusers.

Yesterday The Conservative Tribune posted an article about one of Donald Trump’s attackers–retired General John Allen. General Allen spoke in Philadelphia and has appeared on a few news shows since then.

The article reports General Allen’s statements about Donald Trump:

Allen apparently wasn’t just referring to Trump’s statement that he would reintroduce waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, but that he would bomb the Islamic State group. Apparently, that’s an illegal order now, too.

“He’s talked about needing to torture. He’s talked about needing to murder the families of alleged terrorists,” Allen said. “He’s talked about carpet-bombing ISIL. Who do you think is going to be carpet-bombed when all that occurs? It’s going to be innocent families.”

“What we need to do is ensure that we don’t create an environment that puts us on a track conceivably where the United States military finds itself in a civil military crisis with a commander in chief who would have us do illegal things.”

Actually, that sounds better than the current rules of engagement.

Let’s look at General Allen’s record. The article reports:

Allen was, at one point, the White House coordinator for anti-Islamic State group efforts. Along with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and the whole sick crew, he was responsible for the policy of treating the Islamic State as the “JV team” — a bunch of angry, stupid teens who had somehow found Kalashnikovs and were taking their angst out on the world.

He’s the one who helped construct a policy where a group with ultramodern weaponry and a Bronze Age ideology were considered to be no threat whatsoever.

That’s not all. He was also responsible for the funding and arming of so-called “moderate” Islamic rebels in Syria. Lo and behold, these were the rebel groups who often decided that their allegiance — as well as their funds and weaponry — belonged to the Islamic State group. Others merely surrendered their weapons.

It gets worse:

He’s one of the people behind the drone killing of terrorist imam Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, in Yemen. Now, granted, al-Awlaki was a detestable individual, but the American-born cleric had never been charged in court nor had his citizenship stripped. He was the first American citizen specifically targeted and killed without any due process. And this is a man who thinks enhanced interrogation techniques are going to cause a military revolt?

General Allen retired as the result of a sex scandal (he fits right in with the Clintons). This is the portrait of the latest accuser of Donald Trump.

 

 

Some Good News About ISIS

The U.K. Daily Mail reported yesterday that three ISIS leaders have been killed within ten days of each other by a sniper in the Libyan city of Sirte.

The article reports:

The leaders are said to have been picked off one-by-one in Sirte, the Libyan coastal city where Muammar Gaddaffi was born, which the militants took control of last year.

According to unconfirmed social media reports, ISIS fighters are now sweeping the city for the man ordinary Libyans are said to be dubbing ‘Daesh hunter’. 

The article further reports:

…social media is ablaze with reports of rumours of the sniper, who has become somewhat of a hero to those living under the control of the evil terror group, according to the Libya Herald

The Islamists are not popular in the city, and days after the first assassination a ‘photo report’ emerged, showing the terror group executing at least three men and whipped another for drinking alcohol.

ISIS reportedly has 3,000 fighters in Sirte and has imposed the strict rules familiar with residents in their defacto capital in Raqqa, Syria.

Beheadings and crucifixions plague the town, which has been deserted by citizens by the thousands.  

My only hope is that the sniper will continue his work.

Oh, What A Tangled Web We Weave…

The real advantage to telling the truth is that you don’t have to remember what you said. As you get older, that matters. Today The Wall Street Journal posted an story by Kimberley Strassel showing how lies about her emails are becoming a problem for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ms. Strassel notes that nothing Mrs. Clinton has previously stated about her emails has turned out to be true.

The article cites a few problem areas:

The Democratic presidential aspirant on March 10 held a press conference pitched as her first and last word on the revelation that she’d used a private email server while secretary of state. She told reporters that she’d turned over to the State Department “all my emails that could possibly be work-related.” And she insisted that she “did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”

Both of those statements have been proven to be false. Ms. Strassel points out that as a result the Benghazi probe, Sidney Blumenthal was forced to turn over his emails, which revealed work-related emails that had not been disclosed. Mr. Blumenthal’s emails also revealed that the emails Mrs. Clinton turned over had been altered–work related sentences and paragraphs had been removed.

Since Mrs. Clinton began turning over her emails, some of them have been designated ‘classified.’

The article points out:

We also know that the State Department has now upgraded at least 25 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails to “classified” status. State is suggesting this is no big deal, noting that it is “routine” to upgrade material during the public-disclosure process. But that’s beside the point. This isn’t about after-the-fact disclosure. It’s about security at the time—whether Mrs. Clinton was sending and storing sensitive government information on a hackable private email system. Turns out, she was. For the record, it is a federal crime to “knowingly” house classified information at an “unauthorized location.”

From what we know so far, Mrs. Clinton is guilty of a crime. However, because she is not Richard Nixon and there is no contemporary Woodward or Bernstein who are going to inform the general public as to what is going on, she is not at risk of being held accountable. This is another example of the American media choosing not to do its job. Our nation needs a media that holds our leaders accountable. Right now we don’t have one.

Libya Does Matter

Erick Stakelbeck posted a story on his blog entitled, “Why You Should Care About Libya.” I will admit that I never understood the need to remove Muammar Gaddafi after he began cooperating with the west in the War on Terror. If you remember, as a result of the American invasion of Iraq, in December 2003, Libya renounced its possession of weapons of mass destruction, decommissioning its chemical and nuclear weapons programs. At that point Libya’s relationship with the United States improved and seemed to be moving in a positive direction. Admittedly, his civil rights record was questionable at best, but it was no worse than any government that has followed him.

So why should I care about Libya?

The article explains:

While the West’s attention is focused on ISIS’s rampage through Iraq and Syria, Libya is fast becoming one of the world’s most dangerous and unstable countries–a hotbed of ISIS and Al Qaeda activity and ravaged by civil war. ISIS now wields a major presence in the Libyan cities of Sirte (where it recently seized a civilian airport) and Derna (where it has been battling other jihadist groups for supremacy) along the Mediterranean coast and is making further moves elsewhere in the country.

ISIS has also wasted no time extending its genocide against the Christians of Iraq and Syria to the shores of North Africa. In February, ISIS released a horrific video showing its jihadists beheading 21 Egyptian Christians on a Libyan beach. It issued a similar video in April showing the beheading and shooting of over a dozen Ethiopian Christians in Libya. And just last week, ISIS reportedly kidnapped 88 more Christians–this time, Eritreans–who were refugees traveling through Libya. These Eritrean Christians’ outlook for survival is obviously grim.

So why should you care about ISIS’s advances in Libya? For starters, Libya is rapidly becoming a terrorist safe haven–the kind of place where jihadists can train freely and plot attacks against the United States (see: pre-9/11 Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the ISIS-held territories of Iraq and Syria). That’s bad enough. Worse still is Libya’s geographic proximity to Europe–it lies just 600 miles across the Mediterranean from Italy. And according to a recent Fox News report, ISIS is wasting no time using its Libya strongholds to transit into Europe:

“Refugees” have been pouring into Europe from Libya. In recent weeks, the Italians have picked up at least thirty ISIS fighters who have come into Italy from Libya. This is a threat to Europe and eventually to America.

So what was the regime change in Libya about? What was the Arab Spring really about? In his book Catastrophic Failure, Stephen Coughlin examines the timeline of the Arab Spring. He cites a Der Spiegel article explaining the goal of Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood to bring about the collapse of the Arab governments that were not based on Islamic Law. America, unfortunately, came down on the wrong side of history in the Arab Spring and simply strengthened Al Qaeda and helped bring chaos to the Middle East.

The Egyptian government has moved against the Muslim Brotherhood, sentencing many of its members to death, including former President Mohammed Morsi. Again, the civil rights record of the new Egyptian government is not good, but they have restored order and are eliminating the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood to Egypt. American needs to wake up to the threat the Muslim Brotherhood is to America. I strongly recommend reading “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” by the Muslim Brotherhood operative Mohamed Akram. This is one of the government exhibits from the Holy Land Foundation Trial. You can find more information at Discover the Networks.

There are many lessons we can learn from Libya and many reasons why Libya matters.

This Is Not Really A Surprise

The hope of the Hillary Clinton for President campaign is that by the time Americans vote, they will be so tired of hearing about Benghazi and Mrs. Clinton’s private email server that they won’t even care. So far that strategy has been somewhat successful, but it’s success may be drawing to a close.

On Monday the Daily Caller posted a story about emails provided to a House Committee by Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton insider.

The article reports:

The new Blumenthal-Clinton correspondence was included in a batch of emails Blumenthal gave in response to a subpoena from the Benghazi committee. He will testify in a closed-door session in front of the panel on Tuesday.

It is unclear exactly why Blumenthal’s emails are only now being provided to the committee, though there are two likely explanations. Either Clinton failed to turn the records over to the State Department in December, or the State Department received the emails from Clinton but for some reason failed to turn them over to the Benghazi committee, which is led by South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy.

This, of course, is contrary to Mrs. Clinton’s claim in March that she had turned over all of her emails.

The article further reports:

Clinton said her handlers had sifted through her private email account to find her official emails. She said her personal emails were deleted. A private email server Clinton used to host the email account has also reportedly been wiped clean.

The rest of Clinton’s emails will be released in increments beginning at the end of the month.

This does matter. However, it will probably not matter to Mrs. Clinton’s supporters. I believe that there is no level of dishonesty that Mrs. Clinton could be guilty of that would derail her presidential campaign. That really does not say good things about the American voter.

 

How Naive Do You Have To Be To Believe This?

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted an article today about the latest twists and turns on Hillary Clinton’s private server and private emails. A few months ago, Mrs. Clinton explained to America that she never used her private email server for classified emails. Some of us were skeptical about that statement because, as Secretary of State, a lot of her emails would be at least confidential, but that was her story. Now that many of her emails have been made public (how did that happen when she erased the server? Did only the emails that would not be seriously damaging survive?)

The article reminds us:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton received information on her private email server that has now been classified about the deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi.

The email in question, forwarded to Clinton by her deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, relates to reports of arrests in Libya of possible suspects in the attack.

…The information was not classified at the time the email was sent but was upgraded from “unclassified” to “secret” on Friday at the request of the FBI, according to State Department officials. They said 23 words of the Nov. 18, 2012, message were redacted from the day’s release of 296 emails totaling 896 pages to protect information that could damage foreign relations.

Because the information was not classified at the time the email was sent, no laws were violated, but Friday’s redaction shows that Clinton received sensitive information on her unsecured personal server.

…QUESTION: Were you ever — were you ever specifically briefed on the security implications of using — using your own email server and using your personal address to email with the president?

CLINTON: I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.

Note the statement that says the information was not classified at the time. The author of an email determines its classification. Why did the author of the emails that are now classified change their status?

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. The article includes a very interesting email exchange between Hillary Clinton and Jacob Sullivan. One email includes a second email address (after the existence of a second email address was denied).

The article concludes:

Note the e-mail address on this message — not the hdr22 address that the Clintons have insisted was the only one used by Hillary, but the hrod17 address that got exposed a few days ago. In this e-mail, it looks like Hillary used this address for her more political issues, although without looking at the whole record, it would be difficult to establish that kind of a pattern. This does show, though, that Hillary understood the significance of the collapse of that false narrative, and got her State Department staff to do pre-emptive oppo research on her behalf.

Don’t forget that this is just the first release of material. We will likely see more problems along the same lines, and that may or may not include issues of classification.

There Are No Words

On Friday, CNN posted a story about Muslim migrants fleeing Libya and trying to get to Italy.

The article reports:

Muslims who were among migrants trying to get from Libya to Italy in a boat this week threw 12 fellow passengers overboard — killing them — because the 12 were Christians, Italian police said Thursday.

Italian authorities have arrested 15 people on suspicion of murdering the Christians at sea, police in Palermo, Sicily, said.

At least Italy is arresting those who are suspected of the killing.

The article further reports:

Thousands of people each year make the dangerous sea journey from North Africa to Europe’s Mediterranean coast, often aboard vessels poorly equipped for the trip. Many of them attempt the voyage to flee war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East.

More than 10,000 people have arrived on Italian shores from Libya since last weekend alone, according to the Italian coast guard.

Many die each year while attempting the voyage, often when boats capsized. Last year at least 3,200 died trying to make the trip. Since 2000, according to the International Organization for Migration, almost 22,000 people have died fleeing across the Mediterranean.

We need to take a closer look at what is happening. People are risking their lives to flee Muslim countries that are at war and yet they are killing the people who are fleeing with them because of their religious beliefs. This is unacceptable. The fact that killing Christians is widely accepted in many Muslim circles should be an alarm for the western world. We have to either deal with the philosophy that condones this killing or find a way to contain all of those people who believe it is their duty to kill Christians. This is a worldwide problem, and those countries who are part of western civilization need to face the problem and deal with it. If those people fleeing Libya and other war-torn Muslim countries want to settle in western countries which are peaceful, they need to leave their ideas about killing Christians back in their home countries.

Evidence Of The Decline Of America

On Monday, the Washington Post reported that Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) carried out a series of airstrikes in Tripoli, Libya. Neither country informed the United States before taking action.

The article reports:

The airstrikes appear tied to fear over the growing muscle of Islamist militias. The region’s monarchies and secular dictatorships are increasingly alarmed about Islamist gains from Libya to Syria and Iraq. And the airstrikes may signal a new willingness by some Arab states to take on a more direct military role in the region’s conflicts.

Various groups in Libya have been battling for control of the main Tripoli airport, and the strikes may have been a failed attempt to keep the strategic facility from falling to extremists.

Our intervention in Libya was a mistake. The only true justification for America’s getting involved was to protect the oil fields that supply Europe with oil. There is also some questions as to whether of not Gaddafi was planning to begin to trade oil in currency other than American dollars. If he had done that, it would have crashed the American economy. Gaddafi had turned over his weapons of mass destruction after the United States had invaded Iraq. He was a horrible dictator, but there was no assurance that he would be replaced with anything less horrible. The Obama Administration’s decision to bomb Libya as part of the ‘Arab Spring’ only strengthened the grip of the multiple terrorist groups in Libya and surrounding areas.

President Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East has been a disaster. It will take years to restore the faith in the United States that our allies once had and to undo the damage President Obama has done by supporting the enemies of democracy.

Politicizing Justice In The War On Terror

In case you haven’t noticed, we are still fighting a war on terror. Young girls are being kidnapped, terrorists in the Middle East are killing Christians, and Islamist terrorists seem generally to be running amok. In the midst of this, we are getting ready to try one of the suspects in the attack on the American outpost in Benghazi.

Andrew McCarthy posted an article at National Review today about the indictment of Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the suspect arrested in connection with the attack in Benghazi. It seems that the indictment the Justice Department has created does not make sense when viewed in the context of who Ahmed Abu Khatallah is and what he did.

The article reports:

In big criminal cases — and there are none bigger than those involving terrorist attacks — indictments tend toward book length, written in a narrative style designed to cut through the legalese and explain what happened. See, if the prosecutor is ethically convinced that there is sufficient evidence to convict an accused terrorist, his duty is to plead the case as expansively as necessary to get that evidence admitted.

In terrorism cases, that has always meant fully describing the nature of the terrorist enterprise. Look at the Justice Department’s jihadist cases from the Nineties (see e.g., here). They explain the history of the international jihadist network; the different terrorist organizations and state sponsors it encompasses; the identity, status, and roles of the players; plus all of the different plots and attacks that knit the network together.

The idea is to frame the case in a way that completely and coherently relates it — making it easier for judges to admit controversial evidence and jurors to grasp the willfulness of the accused. That is why the most critical decision made by the prosecutor drafting a terrorism indictment is Count One — i.e., the first statutory offense alleged.

…It seems, however, that the Khatallah prosecution is following a different strategy.

Khatallah has been identified by the State Department as a “senior leader” of Ansar al-Sharia, one of the al-Qaeda-tied franchises in Libya. Yet there is no mention of Ansar al-Sharia in the indictment, much less of al-Qaeda or the Islamic-supremacist ideology that ties jihadist affiliates together. In fact, the indictment does not even accuse Khatallah of being a terrorist.

…In other words, the Justice Department is not alleging that Khatallah himself was a terrorist. It is saying that there were some elusive “terrorists” hanging around Benghazi, and Khatallah conspired to help the “terrorists” by contributing personnel — mainly, himself — to their machinations, knowing that these just might include preparation for a lethal attack on a U.S. facility.

Oh, and the duration of this conspiracy? It is alleged to have lasted about one day — i.e., from approximately sometime on September 11, 2012, to sometime after midnight September 12.

One day. In fact, maybe it was just a few hours.

…Instead, the indictment is written to portray a sudden, spontaneous eruption of violence, without much planning or warning, in which Khatallah — who knows . . . perhaps inspired by a video — abruptly joined a disgruntled group of protesters that turned out to include some shady terrorists motivated by . . . well, who can really say? All we know is the violence started without warning and, before you could scramble a fighter-jet or fuel up Air Force One for a Vegas campaign junket, it was all over.

There are a lot of downsides to giving enemy-combatant terrorists all the majesty of American due process. But at least it used to mean that, by the end, you’d have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Now, it’s starting to look like what you get on the Sunday shows.

It’s time for Eric Holder to go back to Chicago.

Preparing The Field

Unfortunately we are now living in a country where the presidential campaign is never ending. The latest example of this is the selective release of excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming book “Hard Choices” by Politico. The excerpts deal with the attack on the Benghazi outpost on September 11, 2012.

Fox News posted a fact check of the excerpt by Catherine Herridge, their Chief Intelligence correspondent. Ms. Herridge provides a very logical analysis of Mrs. Clinton’s narrative.

One excerpt from the book as posted at Politico:

“There were scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives,” she writes. “It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video. It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were. Both assertions defy not only the evidence but logic as well.”

Note to Mrs. Clinton–no one in Benghazi had seen the video.

Fox News reports:

An independent review of more than 4,000 social media postings, conducted by a leading social media monitoring firm in December 2012, also found the YouTube video was a non-event in Benghazi.

“From the data we have, it’s hard for us to reach the conclusion that the consulate attack was motivated by the movie. Nothing in the immediate picture — surrounding the attack in Libya — suggests that,” Jeff Chapman, chief executive with Agincourt Solutions (now Babel Street), told Fox News.

Chapman said his analysts reviewed postings in Libya, including those from Benghazi, over a three-day period beginning on Sept. 11, and saw “no traffic in Benghazi in the immediate lead-up to the attack related to the anti-Islam film.”

Please follow the link to the Fox News article to read the rest of the fact-check. The upcoming release of this book is the first step in clearing the way for Mrs. Clinton to run for President. The book provides talking points for the Democrats on the investigating committee and will also make the Benghazi scandal old news by the time the election campaign is fully operational.

 

 

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There Will Be More

As the select committee to investigate Benghazi gets organized, gets its security clearances in order, plans its witnesses, etc., there will be those who hope to obstruct its mission. There will also be those who are in search of the truth about what happened that night.

Allen West posted an article on his website today that illustrates why we need the select committee. I strongly suggest you follow the link and read the entire article.

Here are a few excerpts:

I was seated beside someone who personally knew one of the men who was there on the roof in Benghazi. This person was excited to share with me the “ground truth” of what happened September 11, 2012.

…I learned about the proximity of the staging area of the attack to the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, and the attackers were indeed Ansar al-Sharia, a group affiliated with al-Qaida. I came to understand why Ambassador Chris Stevens was there in the first place and that he had in fact requested better security but was denied – the question is, by whom? And I learned that the Martyrs of 17 February Brigade were in charge of security and were the ones who opened the gates, then fled.

I learned there are those who are being threatened with their pensions being cut off if they come forth to speak.

And I learned, as I presumed, that there was a covert weapons scheme going on in Libya, Benghazi. We had been supplying radical Islamists with weapons against Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi, effectively supplying the enemy and destabilizing that country. And it seems that there was a CIA weapons buy-back program, the aim of which was to ship the retrieved weapons out of Libya through Turkey, and to the Islamist forces in Syria.

I strongly suggest that you read the entire article. There are many things that the committee needs to investigate about what happened that night in Benghazi.

I was seated beside someone who personally knew one of the men who was there on the roof in Benghazi. This person was excited to share with me the “ground truth” of what happened September 11, 2012.
Read more at http://allenbwest.com/2014/05/exclusive-confidential-source-reveals-really-happened-benghazi/#fCXybhSrMwdlxbDk.99
I was seated beside someone who personally knew one of the men who was there on the roof in Benghazi. This person was excited to share with me the “ground truth” of what happened September 11, 2012.
Read more at http://allenbwest.com/2014/05/exclusive-confidential-source-reveals-really-happened-benghazi/#fCXybhSrMwdlxbDk.99
I was seated beside someone who personally knew one of the men who was there on the roof in Benghazi. This person was excited to share with me the “ground truth” of what happened September 11, 2012.
Read more at http://allenbwest.com/2014/05/exclusive-confidential-source-reveals-really-happened-benghazi/#fCXybhSrMwdlxbDk.99
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Now That We Have A Committee…

This post is based on two articles–one by the Editors at National Review and one by Andrew McCarthy at National Review. The article by the Editors explains why Benghazi matters, and the article by Andrew McCarthy has some good advice for the Benghazi Select Committee.

The article by the Editors sums up the reasons Benghazi matters:

But the question here is not whether the administration’s misleading statements in the wake of the attacks on U.S. installations in Egypt and Libya are a political scandal in the style of President Nixon’s infamous burglary; they aren’t. But that the administration’s misdeeds here seem to fall short of felony burglary hardly makes the matter a less serious one: The White House misled the American public about a critical matter of national interest, and it continues to practice deceit as the facts of the case are sorted out. That, to answer Hillary Clinton’s callous question, is what difference it makes.

Andrew McCarthy has some advice for the committee:

I was a tough prosecutor but a fair one. If I were the special counsel, I’d do my best to let the chips fall where they may even if it ended up showing that I’d been wrong about things. But truly being fair means you never get to that point: You don’t take an assignment that might disserve the assignment; you don’t take an assignment under circumstances where fair-minded people could be persuaded to wonder whether you’re pursuing the truth or pursuing your own agenda.

The facts of Benghazi are damning for the administration. The select committee should choose one of the dozens of excellent, ethical former prosecutors who have not publicly stated conclusive views on Benghazi. That would make the facts sing for themselves rather than create a target for the partisan demagoguery that could drown them out.

Benghazi is important. The goal is to get to the bottom of what happened, why no one came to the aid of the Ambassador, how the video got blamed, and why has it been so hard to obtain government documents relating to the attack. Those are the questions America wants to have answered.

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About That Three A.M. Phone Call

Tommy Vietor was interviewed on Fox New’s Special Report tonight. It was very obvious that he was attempting damage control after the recent revelations about Benghazi. I posted a copy of the memo that has rejuvenated the questions about the attack in Benghazi in 2011 yesterday (rightwinggranny.com).

There are a few videos on YouTube with excerpts of the interview, but this is a section that is somewhat amazing:

I am sorry that a political campaign was more important that the life of an ambassador and the lives of there other Americans. I truly believe that the reason they were not helped was that the Obama Administration was trying to avoid the political fallout of a military action in Libya in the midst of a Presidential campaign. Remember, President Obama was partly responsible for destabilizing Libya in the first place and was trying to give the impression that the country was under control of rational people. Having to send in troops would have blown that illusion. The other part of this story that is hard to understand is why the President chose to head off to a fundraiser the next morning. He acted as if the incident in Libya was not his responsibility and he did not have to hang around to see what needed to be done. The cover-up is horrible, but the total lack of responsibility on the part of the President is even worse.

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I Don’t Think We Have Learned The Truth Yet

Yesterday The Blaze posted an article which featured an unclassified map of American military forces in the area of Benghazi. Libya, on September 11, 2012. The map was obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request. I am in no way a military strategist, but after looking at the map, I wonder if more could have been done to defend the embassy annex at Benghazi. Here is the map:

Screengrab via Townhall

The American military does not usually leave men behind. I wonder why they chose to close their ears to the cries for help that were coming from Benghazi that night.  We need to have an honest investigation into what happened. So far that investigation has been blocked. The American people (and the families of those killed that night) have a right to know why the military did not show up.

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