VIDEO – BENGHAZI COVERUP – A NEW IRAN CONTRA IN THE MAKING
Monday, August 5th, 2013
VIDEO – DICK MORRIS – BENGHAZI COVERUP – A NEW IRAN CONTRA IN THE MAKING
VIDEO – DICK MORRIS – BENGHAZI COVERUP – A NEW IRAN CONTRA IN THE MAKING
Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) has introduced legislation to create a special select committee to investigate both the terrorist attack and subsequent actions by President Barack Obama’s administration and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Wolf’s bill has 161 co-sponsors. House GOP Leadership has not scheduled a vote on the bill.
Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) plans to harness the support for Wolf’s bill into a “discharge petition” that would force a floor vote on the bill. The petition would need to be signed by 218 members of the House.
“I’m going to describe what a discharge petition is because a lot of people have asked me questions exactly what it is,” Stockman said at the Tuesday press conference outside the U.S. Capitol building. “It’s to ask our leadership or actually demand from our leadership that we have a vote on Frank Wolf’s bill. [Wolf is] a congressman from Virginia who has a long history of being here and is articulate in demanding that we have an independent investigation.” (more…)
AMERICAN T HINKER
May 20, 2013
By Karin McQuillan The author served in the Peace Corps in Senegal, is a retired psychotherapist and a regular contributor to American Thinker.
I can’t look my old liberal friends in the eye after Benghazi. Most partisan disagreements are forgivable, and I try hard not to lose dear friends over politics. Benghazi is different. Benghazi isn’t political for me. Benghazi is about Americans fighting jihadis for their lives and being abandoned to die by politicians. It is about Obama and Clinton calculating what the headlines would look like if they tried to save them or if they did nothing. They chose nothing, and they almost got away with it.
David Gelernter points out on Powerlineblog.com that,
It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate-but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee. Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Which Democratic senator will ask that question today…?
So how do I look my friends in the eye?
This is the question that haunts me. Do Democrats – not the party leaders, not mainstream journalists whose job depends on Democratic Party loyalty – would ordinary, real people, all those regular Democrat voters – would they care if they did pay attention? That is the heart of my curiosity. Because I care so viscerally about Americans serving our country being betrayed for political gain. There’s something truly awful about Obama and Hillary sacrificing men’s lives because attempting to protect them would be inconvenient to his election campaign, to her political ambition.
Surely ordinary Democrats understand that underlings don’t decide to withhold military or emergency assistance to 34 Americans under attack from jihadis on 9/11?
I’d like to understand. Do Democrat voters truly think these actions by a President and Secretary of State are not important? I know we are different on many questions of war and peace and diplomacy. But this is a small, human story. A handful of men, attacked by Islamists, fighting for their lives, abandoned for election politics. We don’t do that in America and pretend it’s okay, do we? (more…)
May 13, 2013
By Ed Lasky
Barack Obama’s “Tower of Fabrications,” as Peter Wehner describes the Benghazi scandal, is beginning to crack. And that crack will soon reveal a central figure behind the cover-up, a man close to Barack Obama for years but generally unknown to the public: Ben Rhodes.
Rhodes has risen from being an obscure and failed fiction writer to formulating foreign and national security policy for Obama precisely because he is willing to his superiors’ bidding regardless of facts. He has a history of using whatever talents he has with the pen to do so.
A few years ago he had drafted the Iraq Study Group report on the causes and mishaps of the Iraq War to focus on Israel — despite the fact that Israel was not part of the scope of the mission the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group was given. Witnesses and experts called by the Committee were appalled. Why did Rhodes distort the record? He seemingly was doing the bidding of his masters who have a history of animus towards Israel. Rhodes had attended Rice University, where the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy is housed; it was headed by Edward Djerejian. Both Baker and his friend Djerejian (a former Ambassador to Syria) have pro-Arab records; criticism of and pressure towards Israel have been hallmarks of their careers. Both Baker and Djerejian played key roles in choosing whom to hire for the Iraq Study Group and how the work was done.
Rhodes may also just be indulging his own pro-Muslim sympathies. He wrote Obama’s infamous Cairo Speech. That paean to the Muslim world was filled with fulsome praise of Islam that were factually incorrect (Rhodes’ post-graduate education, after all, was in fiction-writing and under Obama he seems to have finally found someone who will pay him for writing fiction). The speech avoided references to radical Islam and was filled with platitudes about Islam. The speech highlighted a tougher line towards Israel and “credited” that nation’s founding as due to European guilt over the Holocaust (ignoring 5000 years of history).
Rhodes has gone from writing reports and drafting speeches to playing a key role in formulating foreign and national security policy, according to the New York Times. His closeness to Obama — a man known for his aloofness (“he doesn’t like people” says a former aide) has become well-known.
There is a reason Rhodes is close to Obama.
Everyone in power needs a fixer and, according to the latest revelations, Ben Rhodes is Obama’s fixer.
Rhodes seems to be proud of his role. Patrick Howley of the Daily Caller notes that Rhodes “identifies himself first and foremost as a strategist and mouthpiece for the president’s agenda” whose, quoting Rhodes, “main job, which has always been my job, is to be the person who represents the president’s view on these issues” (more…)
UNDERSTANDING THE THREAT
Guandolo Associates LLC
Even as the White House strove last week to move beyond questions about the Benghazi attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2012, fresh evidence emerged that senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what had happened in the days following the assaults. The Weekly Standard has obtained a timeline briefed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailing the heavy substantive revisions made to the CIA’s talking points, just six weeks before the 2012 presidential election, and additional information about why the changes were made and by whom.
As intelligence officials pieced together the puzzle of events unfolding in Libya, they concluded even before the assaults had ended that al Qaeda-linked terrorists were involved. Senior administration officials, however, sought to obscure the emerging picture and downplay the significance of attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. The frantic process that produced the changes to the talking points took place over a 24-hour period just one day before Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made her now-famous appearances on the Sunday television talk shows. The discussions involved senior officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the White House.
The exchange of emails is laid out in a 43-page report from the chairmen of five committees in the House of Representatives. Although the investigation was conducted by Republicans, leading some reporters and commentators to dismiss it, the report quotes directly from emails between top administration and intelligence officials, and it includes footnotes indicating the times the messages were sent. In some cases, the report did not provide the names of the senders, but The Weekly Standard has confirmed the identities of the authors of two critical emails—one indicating the main reason for the changes and the other announcing that the talking points would receive their final substantive rewrite at a meeting of top administration officials on Saturday, September 15.
The White House provided the emails to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees for a limited time and with the stipulation that the documents were available for review only and would not be turned over to the committees. The White House and committee leadership agreed to that arrangement as part of a deal that would keep Republican senators from blocking the confirmation of John Brennan, the president’s choice to run the CIA. If the House report provides an accurate and complete depiction of the emails, it is clear that senior administration officials engaged in a wholesale rewriting of intelligence assessments about Benghazi in order to mislead the public. The Weekly Standard sought comment from officials at the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, but received none by press time. Within hours of the initial attack on the U.S. facility, the State Department Operations Center sent out two alerts. The first, at 4:05 p.m. (all times are Eastern Daylight Time), indicated that the compound was under attack; the second, at 6:08 p.m., indicated that Ansar al Sharia, an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group operating in Libya, had claimed credit for the attack. According to the House report, these alerts were circulated widely inside the government, including at the highest levels. The fighting in Benghazi continued for another several hours, so top Obama administration officials were told even as the fighting was taking place that U.S. diplomats and intelligence operatives were likely being attacked by al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. A cable sent the following day, September 12, by the CIA station chief in Libya, reported that eyewitnesses confirmed the participation of Islamic militants and made clear that U.S. facilities in Benghazi had come under terrorist attack. It was this fact, along with several others, that top Obama officials would work so hard to obscure.
After a briefing on Capitol Hill by CIA director David Petraeus, Democrat Dutch Ruppersburger, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, asked the intelligence community for unclassified guidance on what members of Congress could say in their public comments on the attacks. The CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis prepared the first draft of a response to the congressman, which was distributed internally for comment at 11:15 a.m. on Friday, September 14 (Version 1 at right). This initial CIA draft included the assertion that the U.S. government “know[s] that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.” That draft also noted that press reports “linked the attack to Ansar al Sharia. The group has since released a statement that its leadership did not order the attacks, but did not deny that some of its members were involved.” Ansar al Sharia, the CIA draft continued, aims to spread sharia law in Libya and “emphasizes the need for jihad.” The agency draft also raised the prospect that the facilities had been the subject of jihadist surveillance and offered a reminder that in the previous six months there had been “at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy.” (more…)
An article from the Daily Beast by John Bolton – Benghazi Bungle – Obama’s pass-the-buck presidentcy
Nobody wake Barack
By MICHAEL GOODWIN
Last Updated: 4:09 AM, February 10, 2013
Posted: 11:24 PM, February 9, 2013
The Benghazi terrorist attack was a debacle in three distinct stages. The fatal mistakes occurred in the first two — the failure to provide adequate security before the attack and the failure to provide help once it started. Those mistakes were tragic, but the Obama administration’s explanations are coherent, though hardly defensible.
The mystery always has been the third stage — the aftermath, or more accurately, the coverup. Even before the bodies of the four Americans came home, the White House was eager to tell any story except the real one.
Aides twisted and turned to create the false narrative that a protest over an anti-Muslim video was spontaneously hijacked by radicals. But two problems quickly emerged: There was no video protest in Benghazi, and the attack, which used heavy weaponry, was well planned.
So, why did the White House spin the web of deceit? Don’t they know the coverup is worse than the crime?
Finally, we have the answer, thanks to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. In his reluctant Senate testimony, he provided the missing piece of the puzzle: The commander in chief was MIA. The coverup was created to protect his absence.
According to Panetta, President Obama checked in with his military team early on during the attack, then checked out for the rest of the night. The next day, we already knew, he blamed the video maker and flew to Las Vegas for a campaign event.
Meanwhile, half a world away, Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans had been slaughtered by Islamists. Their murders on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 gave the incident extra gravity and led the White House to conceal the facts. An honest chronology would have revealed the president’s shocking behavior during the most successful attack against Americans by foreigners since 9/11. (more…)