PHOTOS: 13 HOURS IN BENGHAZI – KRIS PARONTO
Thursday, October 8th, 2015
Thursday, September 3, 2015
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The North African nation is no longer a place to boast about
“This is basically off the top of my head, with a few consultations of my notes. but it shows [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s] leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s Libya policy from start to finish. — Aug. 21, 2011 email from State Department Director of Policy Planning Jake Sullivan to Cheryl D. Mills, chief of staff to Secretary of State Clinton.
Jake Sullivan has been called to testify before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Friday. He left the State Department with Mrs. Clinton. He is now the chief national security aide for the Clinton campaign. According to Politico, the Clinton campaign has told a “group of ‘Hillblazers’ that it would soon start getting regular policy briefings via conference calls with one of Clinton’s closest policy aides, Jake Sullivan.” He is the inside-the-Beltway odds-on favorite to be national security adviser if Mrs. Clinton is elected president in 2016.
Leaving aside Mr. Sullivan’s enthusiasm for his boss in 2011, what is the Libya today of which Mrs. Clinton would have total “leadership/ownership/stewardship,” if she were to claim possession?
The story begins on June 4, 2009, with President Obama’s speech at Cairo University, which the White House website still calls “A New Beginning.” In that time frame, President Obama was riding high in the polls, he had huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and by October it would be announced that he had been selected to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Under these circumstances, it would be hard for anyone to keep his feet on the ground.
While not havens of human rights virtue, in June 2009 the Middle East and North Africa was more or less stable. al Qaeda had been defeated in Iraq. Energetic local governments had marginalized most Muslim extremist organizations. Col. Moammar Gadhafi had seen the light and was cooperating with the United States on control of extremists and weapons of mass destruction proliferation. Religious minorities, especially Christians, were protected. Antiquities were respected as part of the region’s cultural heritage. There were no civil wars, no mass killings, no widespread destruction of homes, no new waves of refugees. There was at least some measure of hope for millions of people.
All of that changed after President Obama’s Cairo speech. The Egyptian government was overthrown and a Muslim Brotherhood regime installed, lasting until the Egyptian people demanded that the army restore order. Withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq resulted in a vacuum that the Islamic State was happy to fill. A demand that “Assad must go” led to civil war, with ISIS now in the suburbs of Damascus. Christians and other religious minorities who had remained in the region for more than a thousand years are now under intense persecution — killed, enslaved, and houses of worship destroyed. Waves of refugees are pouring into Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people from Iraq to North Africa have been killed. More lost their homes and wander aimlessly in their own countries.
And then there is Libya. As Mr. Sullivan was writing in August 2011, the country was descending into chaos. By October, Gadhafi was dead and by September 2012 so, too, were the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
Libya today is a failed state. The 2006 census of Libya listed the population at 6.6 million people. About 9 percent of the population, 550,000 Libyans, are “internally displaced,” which is the nice way of saying they have lost their homes and are wandering the country seeking help where they can find it. In U.S. terms that would be about the equivalent of something in excess of 30 million Americans losing their homes. There are no reliable estimates of how many Libyans have been killed, maimed or made orphans since Mr. Sullivan’s August 2011 email.
With rampant lawlessness in the country, the human wolves have thrived, putting desperate refugees by the hundreds into overcrowded and unseaworthy boats. The Libyan Red Crescent patrols the beaches and buries the bodies by the dozens that wash ashore.
ISIS has made Libya its North African headquarters. Tunisian radicals trained in Libya have made two attacks on tourists in Tunis that killed more than 60 people. Gadhafi’s depots of conventional arms have been looted and the contents distributed widely. Out of total despair, Libyan politicians have begged the Arab League to send warplanes to bomb their own country.
A member of Congress can ask any question he or she likes. Perhaps the Benghazi Committee could revisit August 2011 and ask Mr. Sullivan why he thought Mrs. Clinton had total “leadership/ownership/stewardship” of Libya policy. Further, he could be asked whether, in the light of the current situation in Libya, her “stewardship” has been positive or negative for the people of Libya?
• William C. Triplett II is a former chief Republican counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
A Syrian Kurdish fighter in Kobani, Syria, in January Associated Press
WorldMag.com, By J.C. DERRICK, May 18, 2015:
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Clare Lopez, a member of the Citizens Commission on Benghazi—a group of former intelligence officers, military personnel, and national security experts—told me it comes as no surprise that Benghazi was a retaliatory attack since al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a video had called on the “sons of Libya” to avenge his deputy’s death. Lopez said the Judicial Watch release is “very significant,” because it “begins to peel back a little more of the layers of the onion about what was going on in Benghazi, and why that mission [facility] was there.”
Lopez, a former CIA officer who is now a vice president at the Center for Security Policy, said the commission has confirmed it was not the CIA but the State Department that managed the gun-running operation. According to Lopez, the department put up between $125,000 to $175,000 for each surface-to-air missile it funneled out of Libya to the Syrian battlefield.
WASHINGTON—Documents released today confirm the Obama administration knew weapons were flowing out of Benghazi, Libya, to Syrian rebels in 2012 even though the rebels had well-publicized ties to al-Qaeda and other extremist groups.
Previous reports, including one by WORLD in 2013, have linked U.S. involvement in Libya to arms flowing into Syria, but the new documents provide the first verification that contradicts administration officials and congressional Democrats who maintained there was no evidence to support it. The documents provide further confirmation that the CIA and the State Department—under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—received immediate intelligence that the attack was committed by al-Qaeda- and Muslim Brotherhood-linked brigades, even as Clinton and other officials claimed it was the result of rioting against a Muslim-bashing video.
“Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya, to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria,” says an October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document released with heavy redactions. It notes the activity took place weeks before terrorists attacked the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, killing four Americans in September: “The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were [500] sniper rifles, [100] RPGs, and [400] 125 mm and 155 mm howitzers missiles.”
Judicial Watch, a Washington, D.C., watchdog group, obtained the cache of more than 100 documents after filing a lawsuit in federal court. The judge who ordered the release, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is a 2013 appointee of President Barack Obama.
“These documents are jaw-dropping,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said. “No wonder we had to file more FOIA lawsuits and wait over two years for them.” (more…)
Bethany Blankley is a political analyst for Fox News Radio and has appeared on television and radio programs nationwide. She writes about political, cultural and religious issues in America from the perspective of an evangelical and a former communications strategist for four senators, one congressman, a former New York governor and several nonprofits.
She earned her master’s degree in theology …
Read more: www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/7/bethany-blankley-parents-must-reject-common-core-i/#ixzz3WviZIrht
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter – – Tuesday, April 7, 2015
“Where did Common Core come from?” is a question I often hear from parents as I travel the country speaking about the Islamic infiltration of America.
Because in 2014-15 America, public school students via Common Core are:
• Participating in public school-sponsored trips to mosques via taxpayer expense, girls must wear head scarves (Colorado parents complain)
• Debating whether or not the Holocaust was “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain,” (an eighth-grade assignment defended by the Rialto Unified School District, Los Angeles)
• Pledging allegiance in Arabic (New York)
• Observing two “Muslim holy days,” (New York City)
• Being taught Islamic vocabulary lessons (North Carolina)
• Being taught Islamic culture (Tennessee)
• Being taught world history from Islamic perspective (Florida) that includes learning about the five pillars of Islam (Maryland father, a Marine Corps veteran, complains and is banned from school grounds)
• Told to proselytize by creating a pamphlet about Islam to “introduce Islam to 3rd graders” that introduces Allah to children as the same God of the Christians and Jews (Michigan)
• Reciting in class the Shahada, “There is No God but Allah,” and the Muslim call to prayer (Massachusetts)
Parents in every state are outraged, protesting and asking, “Why is Islam being taught in public schools?” and “How did this happen?” “Where is the ACLU?” “Where are the people ‘protesting against’ religion being taught in public schools?”
Common Core origins
The short answer is that President Obama’s push for “hope and change” translates into completely transforming America — for the worse. Common Core is but one of many parts of an intricate plan to infiltrate every area of American society with Islam. Which is why, Common Core’s origin and funding came from Qatar, Libya and Saudi Arabia.
Globally, Common Core originated from the “One World Education” concept, a global goal orchestrated by the Connect All Schools program. Its origin is funded by the Qatar Foundation International (QFI). The director of QFI’s Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics is Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna. (more…)
Washington Post Editorial Board, Jan. 12, 2015:
WHEN LIBYA’S attempt to construct a new, democratic political system faltered after 2012, the Obama administration and NATO allies who had intervened to support the overthrow of dictator Moammar Gaddafi could still rationalize that they had headed off the mass bloodshed and civil war that the Gaddafi regime threatened and that later overtook Syria. The respite, however, proved to be temporary. As 2015 begins, Libya is well on its way to becoming the Middle East’s second war zone — with the same side effects of empowering radical jihadists and destabilizing neighboring countries.
The sprawling but sparsely populated country of 7 million is now split between two governments, parliaments and armies, one based in the eastern city of Tobruk and the other in the capital, Tripoli. While Syria’s war is fought along the Arab world’s Sunni-Shiite divide, in Libya the contest pits the region’s secular Sunnis against Islamists (along with minority Berbers). Since that same divide dominates the politics of Egypt, Tunisia, the Palestinian territories and much of the rest of the Maghreb, outside powers have predictably picked sides: Egypt and the United Arab Emirates back the secular forces in the east, while Turkey, Qatar and Sudan support the Islamist Libya Dawn in the west. (more…)