12/1/15

Fresh Perspectives on Benghazi Keep the Scandals Alive

While much of the focus of attention on the Benghazi scandal has been about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s actions, and inaction, which may have led to the deaths of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans, there are other aspects of the story that have gotten far less attention, but are, in fact, more revealing and more damning about the foreign policy of the Obama administration.

The failure of the State Department to respond to more than 600 requests for increased security in Libya, and specifically Benghazi, and Mrs. Clinton’s claim that she was unaware of those requests, as she stated at the October 22nd hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, were damning enough.

When Accuracy in Media decided two-and-a-half years ago to form the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB), it was because it had become clear that Congress was doing an inadequate job of getting to the truth, and that the media were doing their best to pretend that this was a phony scandal that didn’t reflect badly on either President Obama or then-Secretary of State Clinton.

Among the key findings of the Commission was the fact that the war in Libya, initially described as a an effort to prevent a humanitarian crisis, but which later became a mission to take out the Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, could very possibly have been avoided through negotiations—an offer the Obama administration turned down. Then there was the dereliction of duty, namely the failure to bring available military forces to bear in an effort to save at least some of the Americans under attack during the night of September 11 and into the early morning of September 12, 2012.

There were the lies about the cause of the attack. We learned with greater specificity at the October hearing that Mrs. Clinton knew the first night, and the following day, that this was a planned, organized terrorist attack by an al-Qaeda related group. She said so in no uncertain terms to her daughter, to the president of Libya and to the Egyptian prime minister. Yet the story she conspired to tell the world, and the family members of the victims of the attack, was that the attack was the result of a YouTube video that was viewed as an insult to Islam.

But with all that, which is well documented and laid out in the CCB’s interim report released in April of 2014, the bigger story remains, “How America Switched Sides in the War on Terror.” This was the result of the fact that the Obama administration “facilitated the delivery of weapons and military support to al Qa’eda-linked rebels in Libya,” as we stated in the report.

Much more information has come out proving that to be the case. Breitbart News’ national security correspondent Edwin Mora has taken a detailed look at this part of the story, interviewing a couple of members of the CCB, and has done an excellent job of laying out the facts. It couldn’t be more timely, as the world is coming to grips with how to deal with the cancer of ISIS—one of the chief beneficiaries of this disastrous U.S. policy—and other jihadist groups that are causing so much death and destruction throughout the world today. But have no fear. According to President Obama, the gathering of more than 150 nations in Paris to posture about global warming serves as “a powerful rebuke to the terrorists.” He has said more than 20 times that climate change is a greater threat to future generations than terrorism, and during his first day in Paris for the conference he said that holding the conference there at this time is “an act of defiance that proves nothing will deter us.”

In Mora’s article for Breitbart, “Benghazi Commission: Obama Admin Gun-Running Scheme Armed Islamic State,” he cites Clare Lopez of the CCB, saying, “The Obama administration pursued a policy in Libya back in 2011 that ultimately allowed guns to walk into the hands of jihadists linked to the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) and al-Qaeda (AQ) in Syria.”

Lopez, the primary author of the CCB report, said, “The ripple effects of the illegal policy to arm America’s enemies continue to be felt as the U.S. military is currently leading a war against ISIS and AQ terrorists in Iraq and Syria.”

“‘The Obama administration effectively switched sides in what used to be called the Global War on Terror [GWOT] when it decided to overthrow the sovereign government of our Libyan ally, Muammar Qaddafi, who’d been helping in the fight against al-Qaeda, by actually teaming up with and facilitating gun-running to Libyan al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood [MB] elements there in 2011,’ explained Lopez. ‘This U.S. gun-running policy in 2011 during the Libyan revolution was directed by [then] Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and [the late Libya Ambassador] Christopher Stevens, who was her official envoy to the Libyan AQ rebels.’”

“‘To avoid having the funds tracked back to the Obama administration, the arms flow to Libya was financed through the United Arab Emirates, while Qatar served as the logistical and shipping hub,’ she noted.”

I urge you to read the entire Breitbart article, and also this Washington Times article, “Clinton State Department approved U.S. weapons shipment to Libya despite ban,” based on documents recovered from the compound in Benghazi. The article gives names and details of how the weapons were transferred, and confirmation that Hillary Clinton’s State Department knew all about it.

There is also a movie coming out in January entitled “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” that we’re hoping is as powerful as the book and the story from the men who wrote it. In the trailer, it shows the authors of the book, members of the CIA Annex Security Team, being told to “stand down.” That phrase is highly charged, because it is something that the Obama administration has claimed never happened. But it did, according to these heroes, who risked their lives to travel the one mile from the CIA Annex to the Special Mission Compound where Ambassador Stevens and Information Officer Sean Smith were killed. They were already dead by the time the men arrived. The movie, from the very successful action-adventure director Michael Bay (“Transformers,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Armageddon”), promises to put Benghazi back in the headlines, at least for a little while.

12/1/15

The Media’s Faux Outrage Over “Domestic Terrorism”

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

We don’t remember any outrage from the media over the alleged roles played by Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in the 1970 bombing murder of San Francisco police officer Brian V. McDonnell. In fact, the media peddled the nonsense that Ayers and Dohrn, who helped launch Barack Obama’s political career, were “anti-war activists” who bombed a few buildings and never hurt anyone.

Since “domestic terrorism” is now a topic of concern for the media, in the wake of the attack on the Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado, can we expect the media to pressure Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch to gather new evidence in the McDonnell case? It’s not likely.

Lynch has already seized upon the killings at the Planned Parenthood clinic,saying federal officials “stand ready to offer any and all assistance to the district attorney and state and local law enforcement in Colorado as they move forward with their investigation.” Yet, neither Lynch nor her predecessor, Eric Holder, committed any resources toward solving the McDonnell murder, which is still an open case.

There is no statute of limitations on murder. But because Ayers and Dohrn were associates of Obama and helped launch his campaign for political office in Chicago, the media have shied away from the McDonnell murder story and have distorted the facts of the case.

The double standard proves the media have no interest in exposing alleged “domestic terrorism.”

For more than seven years Accuracy in Media has been calling on the media to join the campaign to get justice for McDonnell’s family. Many news media organizations have falsely claimed the Weather Underground terrorist organization of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn destroyed property but did not kill people. In fact, the McDonnell murder was blamed by the FBI and other law enforcement organizations on the Weather Underground. What’s more, former FBI informant Larry Grathwohl named Ayers and Dohrn as being involved in, or having knowledge of, the plot to kill McDonnell and other police officers. Grathwohl has passed away, but former FBI agents like Max Noel say evidence can still be gathered in the case and that old evidence can be analyzed with new forensic techniques.

When a Planned Parenthood clinic is apparently targeted by a crazy nut living in a shack, the media are determined to link him to conservative Christians and pro-lifers who work through the democratic system to shut down federal funding of these killing centers. Planned Parenthood propaganda about the alleged culprit being inspired by politicians who want to defund the abortion industry is published as if it were established fact.

The media want you to believe that the killing outside Planned Parenthood is more significant than the killing which goes on inside. Yet we have seen in the videos from the Center for Medical Progress that unborn babies are being killed and their baby parts harvested for profit. These, too, are human lives.

In contrast to the Colorado case, the Weather Underground was part of a global network with foreign connections that reached into the Oval Office itself. Yet, for seven years the Obama administration has refused to commit sufficient resources to investigating this network and bringing terrorists who were part of it to justice. Our pro-Obama media simply don’t care.

This is why the left-wing rhetoric from the media about protecting women’s health and women’s lives in the wake of the Colorado killings cannot be taken seriously. They see this violence as a political opportunity to smear conservatives. They don’t care a whit about “domestic terrorism,” except when it serves their political purposes.

In association with the Black Liberation Army (BLA), the Weather Underground carried out the October 20, 1981 armed terrorist assault on a Brinks armored car that left Nyack, New York Police Sgt. Edward O’Grady, Patrolman Waverly Brown and Brinks guard Peter Paige dead. Cheri Laverne Dalton is wanted for her alleged involvement in that robbery. She is on the FBI’s “domestic terrorism” listand is believed to be living in Cuba.

Obama normalized relations with Cuba without demanding the return of Dalton and other fugitives from American justice, such as Joanne Chesimard of the BLA and William Morales of the Puerto Rican FALN. Chesimard killed a New Jersey State Trooper.

Two members of the May 19 Communist Organization, a support group for the Weather Underground, are still on the FBI “domestic terrorism” wanted list. They are Donna Joan Borup and Elizabeth Anna Duke. Our media show no interest in helping to apprehend them. Neither does the Obama administration.

Obama’s first attorney general, Eric Holder, was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, where he played a key role in pardons for members of the FALN and the Weather Underground. As attorney general, he approved the early release from prison of communist terrorist Marilyn Buck, a member of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army.

In the case of Chesimard, who is a member of the “Most Wanted Terrorists List,” Lynch could authorize FBI director James Comey to wiretap Obama’s friends, Ayers and Dohrn, and other members of the Weather Underground, in order to find out where in Cuba she might be living. The Weather Underground had helped Chesimard—a convicted cop-killer—escape from a New Jersey prison in 1979 and flee to Cuba.

Somehow we doubt that Lynch has any interest in bring Chesimard to justice.

But Lynch will use federal resources to go after a nut, who apparently opened fire on a Planned Parenthood clinic and is now in custody.

The Obama administration and its media allies don’t care at all about bringing terrorists to justice. They use terrorism as a partisan political issue.

12/1/15

Chicago’s Communists Lead Anti-Cop Protests Over McDonald Shooting

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Guess who’s behind the protests in Chicago? Old, white communists from the ’60s – again. These agitators helped organize and coordinate last week’s protests in Chicago over the shooting death of Laquan McDonald. He was a 17 year-old black thug. A dashcam video shows him being shot 16 times by a white police officer. Cue the riots led by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

These communists belong to the Revolutionary Communist Party. They are a far-left Maoist group who is all for violent revolution.

The festivities began at about 4 pm last Wednesday, downtown on the corner of Jackson and State Streets. The night before, these same communists enthusiastically handed out fliers stating their intention to be the driving force in the protest movement there. Retirement is so boring.

It didn’t start out as much of a protest evidently, but that changed as they made their way to downtown Chicago. Hundreds gathered to follow the radicals. The communists worked diligently together carrying a bullhorn, a connected loud speaker and a carefully crafted sign from an October protest in New York City. The primary agitator at the protest screaming nonstop into the bullhorn with a barrage of chants was longtime communist Chicago activist Grant Newburger.

Newburger claimed to be the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade when he was in his 40’s. Now he’s 57 and still at it. During Wednesday’s protest, he kept shouting to the crowd political stances pushing his communist agenda. Newburger and other communists urged people to show up for the protest on Black Friday, so they could shut down the “Magnificent Mile.” Newburger led moronic chants like, “16 shots!” Another shout-back recital was: “CPD. KKK. How many kids did you kill today?”

Here is Newburger in 2007 at his apartment in the now-demolished Cabrini–Green public housing project. (Note the prominent poster of Chairman Mao on the wall.)

Enter another commie, Lou Downey. He’s also a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. “Send the killer cops to jail,” Downey urged protesters to chant. He was followed by yet another middle-aged white communist woman yelling into the bullhorn.

The meandering crowd was halted by police around 6 pm on Wednesday before they could get to Lake Shore Drive, which is a bustling thoroughfare. So, they turned around and headed south. They eventually made their way to the Trump International Hotel & Tower blocking traffic as they went. “We are the people! The mighty mighty, mighty people,” was a communist agitator-led chant. Also: “Whose streets? OUR STREETS!” These people need to get some seriously new chants going. It’s trite. In front of Trump’s place, protesters yelled “hands up, don’t shoot” at an assembled throng of police officers. What an insult and a lie to boot.

“How many bullets in the clip?” an enraged white protester shouted at the cops while marching. “Fuck y’all.” “We are not products! We cannot be bought or sold!” was another Mensa moment. Next in line were the offices of ESPN radio and the local ABC affiliate.

By 9 pm, the white-communist-led protesters had made their way to the south Loop chanting “fuck the police.” Also: “We’re black. We’re strong. We’re marchin’ all night long.” If they weren’t so violent and dangerous, I’d compare them to four year-olds who are colorblind. For kicks, when they got to Millennium Park, they ripped the lights from the City of Chicago Christmas tree. If there’s one thing commies hate more than cops, it’s Christians.

From the beginning of the protests across the nation, including the Occupy movement and now Black Lives Matter, I have said that you would find communists behind the radicals. The Revolutionary Communist Party is a big player in all this, with their aging hippie Marxists who feel this is their last chance to cause upheaval in the nation. They have always hated the police and now they have a vehicle to work on that hatred. Charlie Manson would be proud.

You saw these same people in Ferguson, Missouri. They paid protesters and were behind the movements there. Now they are in Chicago. But trust me, wherever you see racial division and violent chaos in the streets, the communists are not far behind. And not all of them are old… there are a lot of young ones joining the ranks these days.

“We are revolutionaries,” Downey, the well-traveled communist agitator, told The Kansas City Star in August 2014. “We’re working to do this in a way that puts an end to the system that for generations has criminalized youth, especially black youth.”

In the Revolutionary Communist Party’s flier, they describe the efforts of police officers as “a campaign of terror with genocidal implications.” “This is a situation where the burning anger and righteous refusal of the people to take this shit any more has erupted repeatedly into resistance since the uprising in Ferguson over Mike Brown’s murder,” the handout declares. “We need an end to the whole system of capitalism-imperialism.”

“We need a whole different system, one where the system of oppression of Black people and other oppressed nationalities is eliminated, along with all the other outrages this system perpetuates here and around the world. This requires an actual revolution. This revolution is real and possible.”

The Party’s website presents a glowing picture of their founder and leader, Bob Avakian. Reality is somewhat different.

Bob Avakian is the Chairman of the anti-capitalism, Maoist Communist party formed in 1975 within the United States called the Revolutionary Communist Party.

In “From Ike to Mao and Beyond” (2005), Avakian tells the story of a middle-class California boy who moved left during the ’60s, first in the Free Speech Movement and Students for a Democratic Society at Berkeley, then with the Black Panther Party, and finally into the far-left Maoism of the party he founded in 1975, the Revolutionary Union – later to become the Revolutionary Communist Party.

A little history… Students for a Democratic Society met in June 1969 in Chicago. By this time, S.D.S. had more than a hundred thousand members, making it the largest leftist organization in the United States. Its politics were anti-imperialist and somewhat Marxist, although anarchist currents existed in the organization, as well. During the convention, three ideological groupings became clear. One was led by the Progressive Labor Party faction and espoused a Maoist philosophy, another was the Weatherman faction, also Maoist, but also a follower of third-world revolutionary nationalism, and the third dominant grouping was Marxist-Leninist. This latter grouping was originally known as the Revolutionary Youth Movement 2 (RYM 2). As time progressed, RYM 2 splintered into smaller formations, with one of the largest organizations calling itself the Revolutionary Union (R.U.).

R.U. began in the San Francisco Bay Area under the leadership of Jane Franklin, Bruce Franklin and Bob Avakian. In 1979, Avakian was arrested at a demonstration against Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the White House; charged with assaulting a police officer, he fled the United States for France. It is unknown where Avakian, “Chairman Bob,” currently resides.

“He has advanced the science of communism and made decisive breakthroughs in the theory, method, and strategy of revolution and the final goal of communism throughout the world,” their website declares.

The Revolutionary Communist Party runs a handful of radical bookstore franchises around the country called Revolution Books.

The Chicago mess started when McDonald died on October 20th, 2014. Evidence was withheld and once video was leaked, everything blew up. The officer in question is Jason Van Dyke, who has now been indicted on a single charge of first-degree murder. In the now public video, McDonald has a knife and is walking away from the police officers. Van Dyke shot McDonald from 15 feet away. He kept shooting even after the teenager was on the ground unresponsive. Van Dyke has been denied bail and he is in protective custody. Van Dyke’s lawyer has said the officer opened fire because he feared for his life and the lives of other police officers when he saw McDonald had a knife. He is citing the “Fleeing Felon” rule. Under U.S. law, the “Fleeing Felon” rule was limited in 1985 to non-lethal force in most cases by Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1. The justices held that deadly force “may not be used unless necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious bodily harm to the officer or others.” If he is convicted, he will probably get 20 to life. The CPD has already settled with the McDonald family for $5 million reportedly.

Give the McDonald family its due… they asked people to refrain from violence this week. Then the commies came to gin people up just like they always do.

The Revolutionary Communist Party flier called for a Black Friday protest to begin at Chicago’s famous Old Water Tower at 11 am last Friday:

Black Friday saw thousands march in Chicago… they literally shut down the “Magnificent Mile.” This disrupted business on the busiest retail day of the year. It was the continuation of the protest over the shooting death of McDonald by officer Jason Van Dyke. The protest was also over the fact that the shooting has taken well over a year to even come up in court. They didn’t like the handling of the case and that was reflected this morning as the Police Superintendent was fired by the mayor there in Chicago. Mayor Rahm Emanuel never lets a crisis go to waste and he has found a sacrificial lamb to take the fall for all this.

Father Pfleger helped organize the Black Friday protests in Chicago. Father Michael Pfleger was a spiritual adviser to Barack Obama. He’s also a stone cold Marxist and a devout radical. He protested with Obama against the payday loan industry demanding the State of Illinois regulate loan businesses in January of 2000. He’s just one more communist member who abhors capitalism.

Approximately 2,000 protesters marched in the cold and wet with signs that said “Stop Police Terror” and other nifty slogans. Organizers said the rally, led by activist-politician Rev. Jesse Jackson and several state elected officials, was a show of outrage over the October 2014 death of Laquan McDonald and what they see as racial bias in U.S. policing. It took the prosecutor 13 months to announce charges in the case and just hours later, a graphic video of the shooting was released to comply with a court order. Now, the protesters want the head of the prosecutor as well and they may just get it at this rate.

“It’s unconscionable that the police officer who killed Laquan McDonald was able to sit at a desk for over a year and draw a paycheck,” said James Hinton, 49, who joined the march holding a sign that read: “13 months, 16 shots.” The protesters chanted “Stop the cover up, 16 shots,” as they marched along Michigan Avenue.

This is another instance of communists, anarchists, racists, Islamists and radicals joining forces because they want to ‘change’ the face of America. They all have different goals, but they believe if they unite to defeat a common enemy, they can overthrow the U.S. from within. The death of the teenager was tragic and it remains to be seen whether the officer will be held accountable for doing what he saw as his job. What will come as no surprise is that these aging, white, hippie communists will be somewhere behind every protest and every hate-filled event you see in our streets. That’s where they put their money and efforts. It’s what they live for… they want revolution.