VIDEO – PANETTA TESTIFIES BEFORE CONGRESS RE BENGHAZI
Saturday, February 9th, 2013Secretary Panetta only spoke to Obama one time during attack
Archive for the ‘Libya’ Category
THE OBAMA VACUUM
Monday, February 4th, 2013
Published on The Weekly Standard (www.weeklystandard.com)
The Obama Vacuum
Lee Smith
February 4, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 20
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Among other reasons for its silence, the Obama administration wants help from Algeria in Mali. It is unlikely to receive it, however, because the regime in Algiers cares only for its own stability, not regional stability. Algeria is little concerned that some of the Polisario fighters it supports in the Western Sahara have found their way into AQIM units fighting in Mali. The point is to keep their own realm secure regardless of the instability they create elsewhere. The vacuum that the Obama administration has left in the region, from Libya to Syria, is not going to be filled by Arab security services like Algeria’s. Instead, they are a large part of the problem.
One thing Hillary Clinton got right in her testimony before Congress last week: “When America is absent,” she said, “there are consequences.” But the administration she served has chosen to be absent, and we are seeing the consequences play out, from North Africa to the Levant, where the unchecked flow of weapons, experienced jihadist fighters, and Salafist ideology is reshaping the regional balance of power—and tilting it against the United States.
There was no forceful response to the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb operation in September that murdered four Americans at the Benghazi consulate. That may help explain why an AQIM splinter group was emboldened to take Western hostages, including seven Americans, at a natural gas facility in the Algerian desert earlier this month. After all, if the administration does not hold itself accountable—“what difference, at this point, does it make?” Clinton said, regarding whether or not the Benghazi attack was a terrorist operation—how can U.S. adversaries know they will pay a price when they kill Americans?
Obama’s desire to disengage from the Middle East was driven at first by his politically useful cartoon version of Bush’s Iraq, a “quagmire” that he wished to avoid at all costs. But now, at the beginning of his second term, Obama seems to fear U.S. intervention of any kind. Indeed, his administration’s reluctance to do any follow-up work in Libya after the initial bombing left a weak, democratically elected, non-Islamist Libyan government to fend for itself, which has produced a region-wide catastrophe.
Some of Qaddafi’s arsenal of NATO-quality small arms has made its way into Hamas’s hands in Gaza via Iranian-established smuggling routes. Some of those weapons are also winding up in Syria, as have hardened Libyan Islamists fighting alongside other foreign militants in the war to bring down Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. It is certainly in the interests of the United States to see Iran’s key Arab ally toppled. But there is no reason to have provided the global jihad movement with another platform for its activity. It should not have been difficult for the White House to figure out that without American leadership, regional Sunni allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar would resort to their traditional fallback position—enlisting Islamist fighters, from the Muslim Brotherhood to al Qaeda, to defeat Assad. (more…)
THE JIHADIST ERUPTION IN AFRICA
Thursday, January 24th, 2013
- January 18, 2013
Shiraz Maher: The Jihadist Eruption in Africa
Al Qaeda affiliates capture Westerners in Algeria and hold a Texas-size piece of territory in neighboring Mali.
By Shiraz Maher
Mr. Maher is a senior fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London.
The hostage crisis that broke out on Wednesday in Algeria—where more than 40 Westerners were taken captive at a gas plant by al Qaeda fighters—ostensibly has its roots in Mali, Algeria’s neighbor to the southwest. The hostage-takers claim that they acted in response to France’s intervention last week in Mali to combat gains by a jihadist insurrection. But the story actually begins in Libya, where unintended consequences of the Arab Spring are now roiling North Africa and West Africa. When NATO forces decided to support the Libyan rebellion against Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, they could scarcely have predicted the impact of their involvement on the region’s labyrinth of competing ethnic and confessional interests.
Gadhafi had long drawn mercenaries from among the Tuareg, a nomadic ethnic group known as the Kurds of Africa because they are spread across five countries without a state of their own. In the early 2000s, Gadhafi began offering his Tuareg mercenaries privileges, including residency permits. When the Arab Spring spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya two years ago, and as his own regular forces began to defect, Gadhafi enlisted support from thousands of Tuareg fighters to suppress the rebellion.
Gadhafi was killed in October 2011, but death failed to halt the malignant spread of his influence, which was already well known to his African neighbors. His Tuareg forces—armed, trained and on the receiving end of much hostility in post-revolutionary Libya—retreated to redoubts in Mali, bringing with them caches of sophisticated arms, including heavy weaponry and antiaircraft missiles.
For decades, the Tuareg people have accused Mali’s government of neglect, corruption and a failure to apply the rule of law. The influx of disaffected fighters from Libya revived their hopes of self-determination and culminated in October 2011 with the creation of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, known as the MNLA. Last spring, this militia overran several towns in northern Mali and declared independence.
Although the MNLA’s ascendancy highlighted the grievances of many northern Malians, the militia’s success wasn’t universally welcomed. Competing ethnic groups in the region, including the Songhai, Peuhl, Bella and Arabs, didn’t necessarily want to be ruled by Tuaregs.
AFP/Getty ImagesFrench troops rolling out of Mali’s capital, Bamako, heading north in Operation Serval, Jan. 15. (more…)
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013
- January 13, 2013
The Struggle for the Fertile Crescent
Syria’s sectarian civil war has upended the political equation across the region, from Baghdad to Lebanon.
- By FOUAD AJAMI
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Perhaps things would not be as they are if the Obama administration had opted for a residual U.S. presence in Iraq that would have checked the influence of Iran and given Baghdad greater assurance and nerve. Perhaps the conflict in Syria would have played out differently had we been spared the courtship of Assad in 2009 and 2010 by the Obama administration, and by an eager Sen. John Kerry, who ran interference for the administration.
With a more assertive American policy, perhaps a line would have been drawn for the Syrians in Lebanon. They had been banished from that country in 2005 thanks to the Cedar Revolution and to the “diplomacy of freedom” practiced by George W. Bush. The Syrians made their way back in 2009, the price for the Obama administration’s “engaging” the dictatorships in Damascus and Tehran.
In Damascus on the first Sunday of the new year, an unrepentant Bashar Assad stepped out of his bunker to announce that there was no end in sight to Syria’s ordeal. “We are in a state of war in the full sense of the word,” he proclaimed. The enemies of his Alawite regime, mostly Sunni jihadists and non-Syrians, he said, were the “enemies of the people and the enemies of God.”
Next door in Iraq, on that same day, Izzat al-Douri, Saddam Hussein’s loyal henchman and a man on the run since the 2003 U.S. invasion, turned up in a videotaped message on Al Arabiya TV. The former Baath Party leader announced his support for his Sunni kinsmen, some of whom had taken to the streets of Anbar province and Baghdad to protest the rule of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Mr. Douri warned his Sunni brethren of a master plan, hatched by Mr. Maliki and his Shiite-controlled Dawa party, to “destroy Iraq and annex it to Iran.”
On Syria’s western border, in Lebanon, a country long in the orbit of Damascus, a Sunni community in hibernation has been stirred by the Syrian rebellion. Lebanon’s second-largest city, Tripoli, has turned into a battleground between Sunni and Alawite militias. The Sunnis can now glimpse the possibility of their own restoration in Lebanon, a challenge to the writ and dominion of Hezbollah.
A struggle rages for a large swath of the Fertile Crescent, perhaps the most serious challenge to the borders of that slice of the Arab world since the European map makers stood up the states of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon in the aftermath of World War I.
David Klein
Syria is the pivot of this tangled political space, which runs from the borders of Iran to the Mediterranean. Bashar Assad, the young, ruthless dictator in Damascus, had been certain that his country would be spared the turmoil of the Arab Spring—indeed he had dismissed that tumult as a “soap bubble” sure to burst. (more…)
OBAMA – SECRET WEAPON DEALS – ISLAMISTS
Monday, December 10th, 2012
NYT: Obama admin approved secret
weapons deals that ended up arming
Islamists in Libya
December 6, 2012 by Ed Morrissey
Oopsie! In what has to be one of the least-shocking outcomes of Barack Obama’s Libyan adventure, the New York Times reports that his administration secretly gave approval of weapons shipments to Libyan resistance fighters, only to learn that the weapons ended up arming Islamist terror networks. Who could have seen that coming, right?
The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.
No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that killed four Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September.
But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried about the consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan militants, concerns that have not previously been reported. The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government.
This is yet another indictment of the Obama approach to decapitating regimes. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Qaddafi, the administration didn’t hesitate to favorably compare the outcome in Libya to that in Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of American troops were used to secure the gains after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The NYT provides a post-mortem on that strategy courtesy of a former State Department adviser on the region: (more…)
FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR SPEAKS OUT ON LACK OF EMBASSY SECURITY
Thursday, December 6th, 2012
- December 4, 2012
My Experience With Lax Embassy Security
The fears—and frustrations— of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi were familiar to American diplomats.
By MATTHEW BRYZA Mr. Bryza served as U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan from 2011-12 and as a deputy assistant secretary of state from 2005-09. He is now director of the International Centre for Defence Studies in Tallinn, Estonia
Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attack that killed him and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, Ambassador Chris Stevens documented his concerns about safety there. He made two separate requests for increased security that weren’t fulfilled—one to local Libyan authorities and one to the State Department in Washington. Both were similar to requests I made last year as a U.S. ambassador serving abroad, and both reflected a far too common frustration among American diplomats.
During my tenure as U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan from February 2011 to January 2012, our embassy continuously faced serious terror threats. As the Washington Post’s Joby Warrick reported on May 28, terrorists planned to murder Israeli and U.S. diplomats and their families—including, I feared, my own—in the capital of Baku. When the threats reached alarming levels during my first week on the job, it immediately became clear how vulnerable we would be to an attack by determined terrorists should they breach our embassy walls.
Associated PressChris Stevens
The key to keeping American personnel safe lay with Azerbaijan’s security forces, who worked with the U.S. to keep potential attackers away from the embassy’s perimeter. Azerbaijani operatives ultimately apprehended the terrorists before they struck. The preventive effort required an unusual level of collaboration between U.S. and Azerbaijani officials beyond the routine requirements under the Geneva Convention for host governments to protect foreign diplomatic facilities. (more…)
MARK STEYN – JILL KELLEY FOR SECRETARY OF STATE
Monday, November 26th, 2012
Mark Steyn: Jill Kelley for secretary of state
2012-11-23
Let us turn from the post-Thanksgiving scenes of inflamed mobs clubbing each other to the ground for a discounted television set to the comparatively placid boulevards of the Middle East. In Cairo, no sooner had Hillary Clinton’s plane cleared Egyptian air space then Mohammed Morsi issued one-man constitutional amendments declaring himself and his Muslim Brotherhood buddies free from judicial oversight and announced that his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, would be retried for all the stuff he was acquitted of in the previous trial. Morsi now wields total control over Parliament, the Judiciary, and the military to a degree Mubarak in his jail cell can only marvel at. Old CIA wisdom: He may be an SOB but he’s our SOB. New post-Arab Spring CIA wisdom: He may be an SOB but at least he’s not our SOB.
But don’t worry. As America’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, assured the House Intelligence Committee at the time of Mubarak’s fall, the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” organization. The name’s just for show, same as the Episcopal Church.
Which brings us to Intelligence Director Clapper’s fellow Intelligence Director, Gen. David Petraeus. Don’t ask me why there’s a Director of National Intelligence and a Director of Central Intelligence. Something to do with 9/11, after which the government decided it could use more intelligence. Instead, it wound up with more Directors of Intelligence, which is the way it usually goes in Washington. Anyway, I blow hot and cold on the Petraeus sex scandal. Initially, it seemed the best shot at getting a largely uninterested public to take notice of the national humiliation and subsequent cover-up over the deaths of American diplomats and the sacking of our consulate in Benghazi. On the other hand, everyone involved in this sorry excuse for a sex scandal seems to have been too busy emailing each other to have had any sex. The FBI was initially reported to have printed out 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails and other communications between Gen. John Allen, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and Jill Kelley of Tampa, one-half of a pair of identical twins dressed like understudies for the CENTCOM mess hall production of “Keeping Up With The Kardashians.” Thirty thousand pages! The complete works of Shakespeare come to about three-and-a-half-thousand pages, but American officials can’t even have a sex scandal without getting bogged down in the paperwork. (more…)
THERE’S TROUBLE ABROAD FOR OBAMA
Wednesday, November 14th, 2012
Trouble abroad for Obama’s
approach
By Jackson Diehl – The Washington Post Jackson Diehl is deputy editorial page editor at The Washington Post.
November 12, 2012
Contrary to the usual Republican narrative, Obama did not lead a U.S. retreat from the world. Instead he sought to pursue the same interests without the same means. He has tried to preserve America’s place as the “indispensable nation” while withdrawing ground troops from war zones, cutting the defense budget, scaling back “nation-building” projects and forswearing U.S.-led interventions.
Is “leading from behind” an unfair moniker for this? Then call it the light footprint doctrine. It’s a strategy that supposes that patient multilateral diplomacy can solve problems like Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability; that drone strikes can do as well at preventing another terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland as do ground forces in Afghanistan; that crises like that of Syria can be left to the U.N. Security Council.
For the last couple of years, the light footprint worked well enough to allow Obama to turn foreign policy into a talking point for his re-election. But the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11 should have been a red flag to all who believe this president has invented a successful new model for U.S. leadership. Far from being an aberration, Benghazi was a toxic byproduct of the light footprint approach – and very likely the first in a series of boomerangs. (more…)
DID TURKEY PLAY A ROLE IN BENGHAZI ATTACK?
Thursday, November 1st, 2012
Published on #1 News Site on the Threat of Radical Islam (www.radicalislam.org)
RI.org Exclusive: Did Turkey Play a Role in
Benghazi Attack?
Clare Lopez is a senior fellow at RadicalIslam.org and a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on the Middle East, national defense and counterterrorism. Lopez served for 25 years as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
If reporting from the Washington Times is accurate, it looks like the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin was in on the plot to attack the U.S. mission in Benghazi. According to an October 27, 2012 report, Libyan witnesses from the Benghazi neighborhood where the U.S. compound was located told reporters from the Associated Press (AP) that “150 bearded gunmen, some wearing the Afghan-style tunics favored by Islamic militants began sealing off the streets” leading to the facility “around nightfall.”
The Department of State “Background Briefing on Libya,” provided by telephone to reporters on October 9, 2012 states that Ambassador Christopher Stevens held his last meeting of the day on September 11 with the Turkish diplomat from 7:30pm to 8:30pm and then escorted him out to the compound gate to bid farewell. At that point, the briefing states, “Everything is calm at 8:30 p.m. There’s nothing unusual.”
But the AP witnesses said that, “The neighbors all described the militants setting up checkpoints around the compound at about 8 p.m.” The checkpoints were described as being manned by bearded jihadis in pickup trucks mounted with heavy machine guns and bearing the logo of the Al-Qaeda terror franchise, Ansar al-Shariah.
That means that the Turkish Consul General would have had to pass out through the blockade as he departed the American compound and left the area. There is no record that he phoned a warning to his American colleague, the one he’d just had dinner with, Ambassador Stevens. Given the description of the blockade around the American compound and of the jihadis and their trucks that were manning it, it seems unlikely that the he somehow just failed to notice. “[N]o one could get out or in,” according to one neighbor interviewed by the AP.
Except for the Turkish Consul General, it would appear. (more…)
DAVID IGNATIUS – LINGERING QUESTIONS ABOUT BENGHAZI
Thursday, November 1st, 2012
Lingering questions about Benghazi
By David Ignatius, Published: October 30
This column has been updated with the administration’s response.
The attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi has become a political football in the presidential campaign, with all the grandstanding and misinformation that entails. But Fox News has raised questions about the attack that deserve a clearer answer from the Obama administration.
Fox’s Jennifer Griffin reported Friday that CIA officers in Benghazi had been told to “stand down” when they wanted to deploy from their base at the annex to repel the attack on the consulate, about a mile away. Fox also reported that the officers requested military support when the annex came under fire that night but that their request had been denied.
The Benghazi tragedy was amplified by Charles Woods, the father of slain CIA contractor Tyrone Woods. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity that White House officials who didn’t authorize military strikes to save the embattled CIA annex were “cowards” and “are guilty of murdering my son.”
The Fox “stand down” story prompted a strong rebuttal from the CIA: “We can say with confidence that the agency reacted quickly to aid our colleagues during that terrible evening in Benghazi. Moreover, no one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.”
So what did happen on the night of Sept. 11, when Woods, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and two others were killed? The best way to establish the facts would be a detailed, unclassified timeline of events; officials say that they are preparing one and that it may be released this week. That’s a must, even in the campaign’s volatile final week. In the meantime, here’s a summary of some of the issues that need to be clarified.
First, on the question of whether Woods and others were made to wait when they asked permission to move out immediately to try to rescue those at the consulate. The answer seems to be yes, but not for very long. There was a brief, initial delay — two people said it was about 20 minutes — before Woods was allowed to leave. One official said that Woods and at least one other CIA colleague were “in the car revving the engine,” waiting for permission to go. Woods died about six hours later, after he returned to the annex. (more…)