05/12/16

America Takes the “Barack Walk” on the Wild Side

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

“America seems to be stuck in the toilet,” says Alveda King, commenting on the Obama administration’s war with North Carolina over sexually confused people getting access to the bathrooms of their choice. The pro-life leader notes that while there are real problems the administration could tackle, it has instead decided that access to public bathrooms by a new sexual minority has suddenly become a high priority under federal civil rights laws. As a result, the country is “headed for disaster,” King says.

This is not an accident. Cultural Marxism, the subject of the new book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, explains the grip that this fanatical ideology has on so many elites in America today. If you doubt how pervasive this has become, watch or read the remarks of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on how transgenderism has suddenly become the wave of the future. Describing the North Carolina bathroom bill, which restricts restroom access by objective measures of DNA and biology, Lynch said, “This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation.”

She added, “This action is about a great deal more than just bathrooms. This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them—indeed, to protect all of us. And it’s about the founding ideals that have led this country—haltingly but inexorably—in the direction of fairness, inclusion and equality for all Americans.”

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07/9/15

AIM Editor Talks About Latest Clinton Email Dump

Accuracy in Media

AIM Editor Roger Aronoff appeared on July 7 on the Philadelphia, PA Conservative Commandos radio show with Rick Trader and Anna C. Little to talk about Aronoff’s recent column “Email Dumps Continue to Undermine Clinton Candidacy.”

Hillary Clinton’s excuses regarding her private email server were immediately exposed as lies when Sidney Blumenthal provided additional emails to the Select Committee on Benghazi, ones that she herself had not provided to the State Department.

Blumenthal “was faced with a dilemma when he went to the Committee,” said Aronoff on the show. He added that if Blumenthal had withheld the emails that made clear that Mrs. Clinton hadn’t turned over all of her work-related emails to the Committee, he would have been risking being held in contempt by the Committee.

“So what we know is that she provided edited material, she didn’t provide all the material—and so she’s caught in these lies,” said Aronoff. He also noted that some of her messages are now classified.

“Yet you don’t hear the media talking about it at all,” he continued. “It’s basically, ‘What did [Donald] Trump say?’ and ‘Ask Chris Christie what Trump said,’ and ask everybody what Trump said, and let’s spend three hours talking about that.”

“But none of this with the apparent nominee for the Democrats,” said Aronoff. “There’s no—very little interest [from] the media in digging into this and talking about this.”

This scandal has a twin counterpart in the conflicts of interest posed by the Clinton Foundation, another story the mainstream media have either not pursued or attacked. “So what they ended up doing was through the Clinton Foundation…that when Hillary was Secretary of State they would take millions of dollars from countries who were doing business with the U.S. government,” he said. “And, again, everyone just wants to act like she’s just above all that, that there’s no way she would do anything. But yet she gets caught in lie, after lie, after lie…”

Aronoff argued that since there is no controlling legal authority willing to hold Clinton accountable at this time, the consequences for her may be more political than legal, especially if Vice President Joe Biden were to jump into the Democratic presidential primary. “I think the Clintons believe it’s their time and their entitlement to have that position,” he said, “and if they see the Obama administration all of a sudden line up behind Biden, whether openly and overtly or kind of behind the scenes, I think it’s going to be a real battle in the party.”

While the Select Committee is currently focused on accessing Clinton’s and her staff’s emails, no further information is necessary to expose the ongoing Benghazi cover-up by the Obama administration and Mrs. Clinton. “We put out a report a year ago April, and people can go look at this,” said Aronoff. “It’s at aim.org/Benghazi, and see what the real story is.”

The Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi’s interim report details how the initial intervention in Libya was unnecessary, that Muammar Qaddafi offered truce talks that the U.S. did not pursue, and that the U.S. government was facilitating the provision of arms to al-Qaeda-linked rebels in that nation.

CCB Member and former CIA officer Clare Lopez recently explained to WorldNetDaily that when Ambassador Chris “Stevens was facilitating the delivery of weapons to the al-Qaida-affiliated militia in Libya, he was living in the facility in Benghazi that was later designated the Special Mission Compound.”

You can listen to the complete interview here.

04/24/15

The DNA Deniers in the Media

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The media have launched a major campaign on behalf of the “transgendered.” The Bruce Jenner ABC News interview is the most visible manifestation of this campaign. However, the NBC Nightly News on Wednesday ran a story by Kate Snow about the “transgender grandchild” of Democratic Rep. Mike Honda of Hawaii. Lacking in the coverage is any concrete definition of the term “transgendered” or any discussion of how children are now being used to promote an increasingly bizarre sexual agenda that requires physically mutilating or chemically treating very confused young people.

The Human Rights Campaign, a group co-founded by accused sex offender Terry Bean, a major Democratic Party fundraiser, quickly highlighted this latest NBC News report in a continuing series on “transgender youth.”

However, just like the terms lesbian, gay, and bisexual, the word “transgendered” applies to certain behaviors or appearances and does not signify anything scientific or biological about a person.

Regardless of what you may see or read in the media, nature has given humanity two sexes, male and female, which are defined by DNA. People can call themselves anything they want, but the biological facts of life cannot be denied.

This is why, when The Washington Post ran a recent story about a “transgendered” soldier who claims to be a man, the paper noted that the military regards “him” as a “her,” because biologically that is what he really is. You cannot change your DNA.

The point is that those claiming to be one of any number of categories of alleged sexual minorities can accurately be labeled DNA deniers if they deny their fundamental biological identity.

The liberals and their media allies always claim they are in favor of science on matters such as global warming or climate change. But strangely, on the matter of human sexuality, science is denied and people are allowed to make up “facts” about themselves, describing their sexuality in terms that happen to be pleasing to them for any reason at all. A new category is “questioning,” meaning that a person can decide, apparently from day to day, what sexual minority they belong to.

If someone feels he or she is a member of the opposite sex, then that is perfectly acceptable, according to the LGBT community and its supporters.

But facts are facts, and science is science. Even liberal publications have to admit this. “The simplest thing DNA can tell you is whether someone is male or female,” notes the Guardian.

But consider the NBC story. Snow referred to Rep. Honda as having “tweeted a photo of himself on Twitter back in February, grinning next to his beautiful 8-year-old granddaughter Malisa…” But Malisa is not a girl. Malisa is biologically a boy. He was born with the name Brody.

Snow reported that the parents “thought their second child would be a boy. But by the time their child was three, she had chosen a new name for herself—Malisa.” A child at the age of three decided to become a girl? Could it be that the child was going through a phase and living in a fantasy? It seems apparent that the child was born a boy and was going through some confusion about his sexual identity. The parents decided to encourage this confusion by allowing the child to now identify as a girl.

Rather than celebrate this bizarre development, the parents should be questioned about their child-rearing skills. What the child (and the parents) may need is serious psychological counseling.

Of course, the homosexuals and their supporters, most notably President Barack Obama, adamantly oppose any kind of change therapy to return troubled young people to their biologically-based sexual orientation.

Snow reported, “Although there are no exact numbers, Malisa joined what experts say is a growing number of children transitioning at a young age.” No exact numbers? Experts? Who are they? This is propaganda masquerading as journalism. It is designed to feed the notion that nature’s determination that humans are born male and female is a gross miscalculation, and that humans can decide whether they are male or female, or whatever.

What Snow is describing is sexual confusion brought on by a culture (and possibly parents) which has obscured the sexual differences between men and women. This is where the homosexual movement has brought our nation.

Snow reports, “The family knows they are just at the beginning of this journey with Malisa, and work closely with a team of doctors. As she approaches puberty, they’ll have to consider whether to use so called puberty blockers and hormone therapy.”

The “puberty blockers” will be designed to stop “Malisa” from being the boy “she” is. They will stop the growth of facial hair and an Adam’s apple. He may also have to undergo some form of sex change surgery or other medical treatment.

Rather than challenge this insidious campaign of making children into pawns of the sexual “liberation” movement, some conservative and Republican politicians on Capitol Hill are voting for measures to in some way “protect” or outlaw alleged “discrimination” against sexual minorities.

For example, ten Republican senators voted for a measure introduced by far left-wing Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy (VT) to protect alleged “LGBT homeless youth.” They were Senators Kelly Ayotte (NH), Shelley Moore Capito (WV), Susan Collins (ME), Dean Heller (NV), Mark Kirk (IL), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Rand Paul (KY), Rob Portman (OH), Dan Sullivan (AK) and Pat Toomey (PA).

The term “LGBT homeless youth” is designed to expand the reach of the federal government into yet another area of human activity, based on questionable surveys and experts.

The power of the propaganda emanating from the media has created the perception, even among these Republicans, that this is a major problem that the federal government must address.

Not surprisingly, the homosexual movement was ecstatic. Thanks to those 10 Republicans, the headline over the AP article was, “A Majority Of The Senate Is Voting For LGBT Rights.”

The DNA deniers are on the march, making serious inroads into the national Republican Party.

03/11/15

Why was Sid Blumenthal advising Hillary Clinton on Libya?

By: Kenneth R. Timmerman
Accuracy in Media

Exclusive to Accuracy in Media

Until Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) revealed last week that his Benghazi Select Committee was investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for her official State Department communications, no one had a good explanation for why none of the Congressional committees that had previously investigated Benghazi had ever cited a single Hillary Clinton email in their reports.

Congressional Democrats had been pooh-poohing Gowdy’s investigation, claiming that all the important questions about Benghazi had been “asked and answered” by previous committees.

Now the best that Gowdy’s counterpart, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), can do is object to subpoenas (especially when they are issued to Hillary Clinton in person, through Counsel), and to huff and puff about the investigation becoming a “surrogate” for the “Republican National Committee.”

What a change a single revelation can bring.

We now learn that Hillary Clinton not only used a private server, maintained at her Chappaqua, New York home for official communications, but that she never used a government email at all. Not once.

No [email protected], or [email protected] or anything of the kind. Just multiple accounts on her family server, clintonemail.com, including [email protected], the same address used by former Clinton White House aide Sidney Blumenthal to communicate with her on Benghazi and related matters.

Federal prosecutors recently finished up their case against former CIA Director David Petraeus, who was conveniently forced to resign just three days after the November 2012 elections, before he could clarify what he knew about Benghazi. (Given that Petraeus had just returned from a September 2, 2012 trip to Ankara, Turkey, where he had been trying to tamp down publicity due to an arms shipment from Benghazi to the Syrian rebels, he certainly knew a lot.)

In a widely criticized decision, they forced him to plea bargain one count of a misdemeanor in exchange for dropping more serious charges. The full extent of the FBI’s case against Petraeus involved him sharing personal, hand-written notebooks with his biographer.

Prosecutors noted that the CIA had installed a SCIF—a specialized high-security area—in his Arlington, Virginia home where he could safely store classified materials brought home from the CIA. That facility was dismantled by the CIA without incident two months after Petraeus resigned from the Agency.

The prosecutors never accused Petraeus of improperly storing U.S. government classified materials either in the SCIF or elsewhere. Nor did they accuse him of sending classified materials over an unsecure server.

If they could prosecute Petraeus on one count of improperly handling classified material (he kept those personal notebooks in a rucksack in his attic), one can only speculate how many thousand counts of mishandling classified information could be brought against Mrs. Clinton. Of course, she denies having sent classified information over her personal server, but in that case how did she communicate on classified matters with her envoys and subordinates?

Was the private server at her residence designed, installed, and maintained by a U.S. government security agency? Was it connected to the government’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) and physically separated from the open Internet?

The Sid Blumenthal memos, sent from his AOL account to Hillary’s private email server, suggest that this was not the case. If so, the former Secretary of State was breaking the law—big time.

When the memos first surfaced in 2013—posted to the Internet by a Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” —neither the State Department nor their purported author acknowledged their authenticity. Given that they initially surfaced on the website of Russia Today, Vladimir Putin’s reliably anti-American TV network, that was enough to consign them to oblivion as yet another Internet hoax.

Now we learn that former CIA official Tyler Drumheller apparently helped to gather the “intel” that Blumenthal sent to Hillary on the Benghazi attacks and other political developments inside Libya.

This is extremely significant because the initial memo sent by Blumenthal, dated September 12, 2012, cites “a sensitive source,” who purportedly met with Libyan President Magarief shortly after the attacks began and claimed that a YouTube video sparked the “protest” against the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

Magarief himself never said such a thing, although the memo is worded to suggest that he did. He blew up when he heard Susan Rice make that claim on the Sunday talk shows after the attack, as I write on pages 347 and 348 of Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi.

Drumheller became infamous for several earlier pieces of disinformation. As European Division chief at the CIA’s Directorate of Operations in 2001 and 2002, he was the one who planted the phony evidence about the Niger uranium contract that was later used by the media during the Valerie Plame affair to claim that George W. Bush had “lied” about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs. On three separate occasions, he passed the Niger information up the food chain as validated intelligence, when the CIA had been warned that it was not (see page 63 of my book Shadow Warriors).

Then-CIA Director George Tenet was so fed up with Drumheller that he spent seven full pages in his memoir debunking claims by Drumheller regarding the defector known as CURVEBALL that Tenet said were simply untrue.

Drumheller and Sid Blumenthal have a history together. In 2007, Blumenthal used Drumheller as a source to “prove” that Bush had “lied” about pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD. Drumheller and Blumenthal went on to work in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2007 and 2008.

So was the Guccifer/Blumenthal memo intended as disinformation, written after Hillary Clinton put out her statement on the night of the attacks blaming them on a YouTube video? Or was it actually the source of Hillary’s false claim about the video, written and sent by someone on the ground in Libya who was attempting to plant the story?

Many reporters, myself included, have submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the State Department, asking for all documents and communications that would show how Mrs. Clinton’s statement came to be worded as it was finally released. Where are all the drafts? Who commented on them? What did it say initially? How was it changed? By whom?

We have much of that information for the Susan Rice talking points, but nothing at all for Hillary Clinton’s statement on the evening of the attacks.

Given that there is not a single mention of a protest or the YouTube video in all the documents released to Congress, which included real-time communications from Tripoli and Benghazi from the State Department and CIA that night, exactly how Mrs. Clinton came up with that idea could provide key insight into what actually happened in Benghazi, and why.

02/3/15

Benghazi Hearings Provide a Glimmer of Hope

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Last week, the Democrat Members of the Select Committee on Benghazi virtually declared war on the majority members, criticizing their pace, rules, and committee scope.

Representative Linda Sanchez (D-CA) claimed that the Select Committee was on a wild goose chase for a nonexistent “unicorn” and “nefarious conspiracy,” and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) falsely called the stand down order a “myth.”

But in what may be a turning point for the Select Committee, Republican Chairman Trey Gowdy emphasized at the January 27th hearing that “we’re gonna pick up the pace…. I have no interest in prolonging” the investigation into Benghazi.

“Letters haven’t worked. Southern politeness hasn’t worked. We’re going to ratchet it up,” he said at what members of the mainstream media, such as U.S. News and World Report, characterized as a “partisan grudge match.”

The next day Chairman Gowdy issued a statement that defied Democrats outright, arguing he “will continue to move the investigation forward in a fair and impartial manner, but…will not allow the minority’s political games and unreasonable demands to interfere with the investigation.” Rep. Gowdy said he will continue operating under the scope originally set by the House of Representatives.

This, the media preferred to coin as political failure or “out of control” politics. “The House Select Committee on Benghazi, which began with dignity last year, spun out of control Tuesday as Democrats complained that Republicans were abusing their authority and Republicans threatened to spray the Obama administration with subpoenas,” wrote Dana Milbank for The Washington Post. Milbank specializes in snarky columns criticizing and marginalizing conservatives, and even took aim at the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi for a conference held on Benghazi in 2013.

Regarding the hearing last week, the Associated Press in turn, remarked, “The partisan tone marked a sharp turnaround for a panel that had won praise for a bipartisan approach through its first two public hearings.”

The subject of the first two slow-rolling hearings was the current state of embassy security, a topic suggested by the committee’s Democratic members which had little to do with the administration’s response to the attack—and which conveniently glosses over the security failures of 2012 to emphasize present solutions instead of accountability.

MSNBC focused largely on political angles instead of substance. For Alex Seitz-Wald, it was all about Hillary Clinton. “Gowdy and Republicans had been hoping to preserve and grow the credibility of their inquiry, which is part of the reason for their assiduous avoidance of taking pot shots at Clinton Tuesday,” wrote Seitz-Wald. “But Democrats are seeking to undermine the credibility of the panel, in the hopes that it will be viewed as a partisan witch hunt if it ever demands testimony from Clinton.”

New bombshell reporting by The Washington Times shows that Clinton was the strong voice pushing to intervene in Libya in 2011 in the first place, which set the stage for the attacks. Ultimately, however, President Obama was the “Decider-in-Chief” and bears at least equal culpability.

Chairman Gowdy told Megyn Kelly of Fox News last May that he plans to subpoena Mrs. Clinton, and repeated that in December. We now learn that the Select Committee has requested Clinton and other top State Department officials’ emails, and that Rep. Gowdy is willing to bring Clinton before the Committee just 30 days after receiving “all the [State Department] documents,” according to CNN.

Select Committee Members would also like to interview 22 persons with firsthand knowledge of Benghazi whom Congress has never spoken to before. The Associated Press reported on January 28, the day after the hearing, that State Department officials said they were ready to “commit” to interview dates for these persons.

But the press doesn’t seem interested in holding the administration accountable for the fact that the State Department waited from the December 4 request until January 28 to issue such a guarantee.

The State Department representative, Joel Rubin, said at the January hearing that a part of the committee’s relationship with the department is indicating priorities for requests—as if more resources could not be allocated to provide such information to the committee more swiftly.

Rubin, formerly of the Ploughshares Fund, also said at the hearing that he was a friend of Ambassador Chris Stevens, who died in 2012 at the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi. Rubin wrote the following for ThinkProgress that year:

“Instead of getting that support, their deaths are being used as a partisan attack on President Obama, part of a false narrative that the president failed them. What has failed them is our political system. Rather than supporting a serious, nonpartisan investigation into what took place and what went wrong, waiting to get all the facts out, conservatives are trying to affix blame for their deaths for political advantage. This is how some conservatives use terrorist attacks against America.”

Now Rubin helps guard the gates for that same President who would like this simply dismissed as a phony scandal.

Although the media, along with the Democrats, may accuse Chairman Gowdy of partisan politics as he attempts to more aggressively investigate the Benghazi attacks and the resulting cover-up, I am cautiously optimistic about his new tone.

“The letter exchanges between Gowdy and Cummings [prior to the hearing], as well as Tuesday’s hearings, should put to rest forever the fiction that this type of investigation can be conducted in some Nirvana-zone of bipartisan comity,” Kenneth Timmerman astutely wrote for Front Page Magazine.

With this new focus on government stonewalling the Committee brought the possibility of embarrassing the administration to the fore, and the backlash was palpable.

Accuracy in Media and the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi have long been critical of the Mike Rogers’ House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report, which contains a number of factual errors and glosses over the intelligence failures leading up to the attacks. Apparently the Select Committee asked to examine the HPSCI’s research in October—and had been asking the Central Intelligence Agency for these files ever since. These files were only produced by the agency after learning that a hearing on them was scheduled.

Similarly, the State Department has produced 40,000 pages related to Benghazi, but Rubin wouldn’t answer as to whether the information provided to the Accountability Review Board was provided fully within those documents.

He also refused to say whether he thought the Select Committee was frivolous.

“If Gowdy is proceeding as a good prosecutor should, he is lining up all his ducks before he goes public with anything,” CCB member, and former CIA officer, Clare Lopez told WorldNetDaily’s Jerome Corsi last week as part of a series of articles about the CCB’s own investigations. “I think it’s premature to jump to a condemnation of the process or the committee leadership when the truth is that we don’t know,” she said.

“Delays by Gowdy are unnecessary at this time,” CCB Member and Retired General Paul Valley told Corsi after the Times’ bombshell dropped. “Gowdy can press forward now as he does have sufficient intelligence and documents to call all witnesses and issue subpoenas as necessary.”

“Additional delays will only give the obstructionists in the Obama White House, the State Department and the Democrats in Congress time to thwart the efforts of the select committee,” Vallely said.

While the administration continues to stonewall the Select Committee whenever possible, and Democrats continue to complain that the investigation isn’t bipartisan enough, the CCB will continue to search for the truth in its own citizen-led investigation.

We have already dug up some disturbing facts in our 2014 interim report, such as:

the administration decision to dismiss the possibility of truce talks with Moammar Qaddafi;
helping arm al-Qaeda-linked rebels in Libya; and
the inadequate military response that night.

“I don’t know if the decision came from the White House or from Hillary Clinton at the State Department,” Retired Rear Admiral Chuck Kubic told Corsi about those failed truce talks. However, Admiral Kubic said, “…the advice for me from AFRICOM was to basically just leave everything alone, to simply stand down.” Who, exactly, at the White House decided it was unnecessary to pursue truce talks with Qaddafi?

The CCB and Accuracy in Media are continuing the search for the truth with our own Freedom of Information Act initiative. Currently, the Department of Defense is withholding 12 pages of maps from us regarding the position of military forces during the attacks.

As we await our day in court, we will not stop digging for the truth through whatever means are available to us. I am encouraged by the possibility that the Select Committee might likewise now use all the powers at its disposal to force the administration to reveal what happened that night and in the aftermath, not only to its Congressional investigators, but to the public as well. America deserves answers, not more stonewalling.