Tag Archives: Libya

09/20/16

American Media Shield Obama and Hillary from Libyan Debacle

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

media

With a new report from the British Parliament condemning their own country’s decision to help intervene in Libya, the mainstream media have started to rewrite history. The media’s revisionism seeks to repair the damaged foreign policy legacy of President Obama by making the decision to intervene in Libya the fault of foreign countries, particularly France and England.

A CNN article written with this purpose in mind bears the headline, “Britain’s Libya intervention led to growth of ISIS, inquiry finds.” Angela Dewan writes, “Britain’s military intervention in Libya was based on ‘inaccurate intelligence’ and ‘erroneous assumptions,’ a report released Wednesday found, pointing the finger at former Prime Minister David Cameron for failing to develop a sound Libya strategy.” Yet, she adds, “the United States became involved and played a key role.”

The role of America in this debacle is not just an addendum to the interference by Britain and France. As The New York Times reported back in February, Hillary Clinton’s “conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel [Muammar] Qaddafi’s forces.” The Times article cites former Defense Secretary Robert Gates as crediting Mrs. Clinton’s influence in tipping the scales for Obama to favor intervening there.

Despite the presence of other nations in the coalition, Mrs. Clinton took credit for the early developments in Libya. She announced on television, “We came, we saw, he died.” Her aide, Jake Sullivan, wrote in a State Department email that Mrs. Clinton had “leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s [L]ibya policy from start to finish.”

One of the decisions that Sullivan notes Mrs. Clinton made was to ensure that the Russians abstain, and other countries support, UN Resolution 1973—the resolution that authorized a no-fly zone over Libya.

But the media are working to ensure that the Libya debacle doesn’t affect Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. Articles on the British parliament’s report by Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek fail to even mention Obama or Clinton.

“The Foreign Affairs Committee concludes that the British government ‘failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element,’” writes Ben Norton for the liberal website Salon. “The summary of the report also notes that the war ‘was not informed by accurate intelligence,’” continues Norton. Ironically, it is Salon which, at least in part, outlines Obama’s and Clinton’s role in creating the chaos that envelops Libya today.

“Saif Qaddafi quietly opened up communications with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened and asked the Pentagon to stop talking to the Libyan government,” writes Norton. “‘Secretary Clinton does not want to negotiate at all,’ a U.S. intelligence official told Saif,” he continues.

It is now clear—and should have been clear at the time—that Qaddafi had no intention of massacring civilians in Benghazi. As we have pointed out in our 2014 and 2016 Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB) reports, Rear Admiral Chuck Kubic (Ret.) was working with Qaddafi’s military to broker a truce. Qaddafi had, Kubic notes, already begun pulling his troops back from Benghazi and Misrata. The United States decided not to pursue the truce talks. The Pentagon has since confirmed (see the top of page 680) that the bid for a truce took place.

President Obama told Fox News that his “worst mistake” was “Probably failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi was toppled in Libya. “What went wrong?” According to this article in The Atlantic, “Obama has placed the responsibility on the entrenched tribalism of Libyan society, as well as the failure of America’s NATO allies to step up to the plate.”

But it was not necessary to get involved in Libya in the first place, given that Qaddafi had become an ally in the War on Terror and had given up his weapons of mass destruction. The intervention demonstrates how the Obama administration switched sides in the war on terror.

Yet the mainstream media seek to exonerate President Obama for his actions in Libya. By reporting on the details of a foreign report describing the mistakes made by the British government leadership, the media can conveniently make the story about British ineptitude.

But what about our own government’s mistakes?

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama cannot escape their part in this debacle, and bear a significant part of the blame for the failed intervention into Libya, even if the media refuse to apportion blame where it truly lies. As former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta wrote in his book, Worthy Fights, “In Afghanistan I misstated our position on how fast we’d be bringing troops home, and I said what everyone in Washington knew but we couldn’t officially acknowledge: that our goal in Libya was regime change.”

Clearly, regime change was the goal of the United States government from very early on. And this debacle has led to the growth of ISIS. As we point out in our 2016 CCB report, the Obama administration facilitated the provision of arms to the al-Qaeda-linked rebels. Obama also authorized covert support to the Syrian rebels. “The Syrian Support Group, with Obama/Chicago connections, became the U.S. conduit for aid to various Syrian rebel militias. Turkey became the distribution hub,” states the CCB report. “…it now appears that at least some of the recipients instead were jihadist units that would eventually coalesce into the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS–later, simply Islamic State or IS).”

In other words, President Obama’s decision to switch sides in the war on terror has directly led to the arming of Islamic radicals in Libya and Syria. This is far from a mistake in failing to plan for the day after—it is a series of mistakes by an administration, and president, willfully ignoring the jihadist sympathies of those the government is arming.

The 2012 Benghazi terror attacks started with the misbegotten adventure by the Obama administration and its NATO allies, who were bent on regime change in Libya. Then came the failure to secure our Special Mission Compound and CIA Annex in Benghazi, the dereliction of duty by failing to come to the aid of our personnel when they were under terrorist attack on September 11 and 12, 2012, and the ensuing cover-up. Despite the media’s attempts to shield President Obama from the blame, he and his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had much to do with the recent and current chaos in Libya.

Roger Aronoff

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi. He can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Roger Aronoff.

09/12/16

The Terrible Legacy of 9/11

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

911

[Editor’s note: I was asked (along with their other contributing editors) by the outstanding website Family Security Matters, to offer up our thoughts on how we “view the significance of 9/11, fifteen years on.” Here was my response, which they posted over the weekend.   Roger Aronoff]

As we approach the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., the tragedy is that the Islamic jihadists are winning too many battles around the world, and have forced the West and its partners to abridge freedoms in pursuit of security. And despite the claims of the Obama administration, the U.S. is not succeeding in leading a coalition of nations to defeat the enemy, which it identifies as ISIL. In fact, ISIL, more commonly known as ISIS, is now operating fully in 18 countries—a three-fold increase in just two years—according to a National Counterterrorism Center report leaked to NBC News in August.

The fact is, after nearly eight years of Obama and Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry, things have gotten much worse in many hot spots across the globe. Through the work of our Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB), we have concluded that Obama came to the White House seeking to empower the Muslim Brotherhood in North Africa, and the Iranian Shi’ite regime in the Persian Gulf region. Because of our unsigned nuclear “deal” with Iran, we have few options when it comes to restraining their behavior. We pretend that we have a common interest with both Russia and Iran, which is to defeat ISIS. But ISIS is just one manifestation of the jihadist ideology that seeks dominance, and submission, as it slaughters tens of thousands of people in its long, drawn out death march.

When the U.S. removed its remaining troops from Iraq in 2011, President Obama announced that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.” That was the same year that the so-called “Arab Spring” led to the fall of America’s ally in Egypt, the start of the Syrian civil war, and the West’s war against Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, who had abandoned his WMD program and was fighting against al Qaeda. That is when America switched sides in the Global War on Terror, as we documented in our first CCB report, and further supported in our second report back in June. Benghazi turned out to be a pile-up of scandal, failed policy and dereliction of duty.

Today we have Libya as a failed state, dominated by jihadist groups; Syria as the home base of ISIS and the scene of what even The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof calledObama’s “worst mistake,” comparing it to Rwanda, with close to a half a million dead; and an emboldened Iran, regularly humiliating America because it can, since it has received an estimated $100 billion in formerly frozen funds, and there is no signed deal for which they can be held accountable. In addition, peace between Israel and the Palestinians is less likely than when President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton came to power.

Meanwhile, the corrupt news media pretend that Obama has been a successful foreign policy president, when, in fact, he has been a disaster. Fifteen years after 9/11, the frequency of terrorist and jihadist attacks is such that they are quickly forgotten in a fog of war that is rapidly enveloping the world.

This article was originally published on the website of Family Security Matters.

Roger Aronoff

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi. He can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Roger Aronoff.

04/5/16

The Panama Papers – In The Beginning There Was Putin

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Putin

Looks like Vlad got caught big time with his mitts in the cookie jar. In the largest financial data leak in history, we are getting to see just how corrupt Vladimir Putin and his inner circle of cronies are. It’s revealing to say the least. It’s a dirty dozen of world leaders who are using offshore tax havens to hidey hole their wealth. But as in all things secret, the light of day is shining into the buried coffers of power brokers. Good times.

And Putin is far from alone… a cadre of celebrities, sports stars, British politicians and the uber wealthy of the planet are all mired in this scandal. Welcome to the Panama Papers. This is a collection of 11 million files or so that contain data to kill for. It makes Edward Snowden look like a rank amateur by comparison. But this wasn’t a hack… it was a mass collection of documents and data.

The leak is originating from one of the world’s most secretive entities… the Panamanian law firm of Mossack Fonseca. In the dirt dug up, the firm is exposed for helping clients launder money, dodge sanctions and evade taxation. Among their clientele are megastars Jackie Chan and Lionel Messi who have invested their millions offshore. Chan is a big fan of communist China. The whole story is like a movie come to life… it’s also revealed that 26 million pounds that was stolen during the Brink’s Mat robbery in 1983 was possibly funneled into an offshore company set up by this firm.

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03/4/16

The Times’ Attempt to Exonerate Hillary Clinton’s Role in Libya

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

The Washington Post recently penned a major story on Hillary Clinton’s leadership on the fate of Libya, integrating positive comments from an anonymous source in order to bolster her scandal-ridden reputation. Now The New York Times has followed suit, publishing an autopsy of what went wrong in Libya that extendsover 12,000 words between its two parts.

The Times writes that they talked with more than 50 people for the story, including Americans, Libyans and Europeans, virtually all who agreed to speak on the record.  “They expressed regret, frustration and in some cases bewilderment about what went wrong and what might have been done differently.”

The Times then asks, “Was the mistake the decision to intervene in the first place, or the mission creep from protecting civilians to ousting a dictator, or the failure to send a peacekeeping force in the aftermath?”

The question remains, however, as to what prompted these columns. After all, both the Post and New York Times articles discuss very little about current events and largely report on Libya’s transformation into a failed state with ISIS strongholds. Clearly, these articles are meant as an attempt to explain how Libya devolved into chaos with neither President Obama, nor Mrs. Clinton, being at fault.

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02/25/16

Salvaging Mrs. Clinton’s Legacy in a Shattered Libya

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

The Washington Post seems unable to grasp the irony of its support for President Obama’s latest military intervention into Libya at the same time that it seeks to salvage Hillary Clinton’s reputation on this issue. Libya remains a failed state, and no amount of reporting can change the facts of this debacle.

“With respect to Libya, I have been clear from the outset that we will go after ISIS wherever it appears, the same way that we went after al Qaeda wherever they appeared,” President Obama told the press on February 16.  “And the testament to the fact that we are doing that already is that we took out…one of ISIS’s most prominent leaders in Libya.”

Obama’s words came out just days before the House Select Committee on Benghazi signaled that its report on the events in Benghazi, Libya will be issued “as soon as possible,” now that it has gained access to most of the necessary witnesses and documents.

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02/14/16

A Disaster Worse Than Libya

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Now that another presidential primary is over, can the media take a few minutes to insist that the candidates address some important issues like the crisis in Aleppo, Syria? Tens of thousands of Syrians are dying or fleeing the Russians and the Iranians, who have invaded the country. President Obama is doing nothing to save them.

The American people should be reminded that Obama lost Libya in a fiasco that cost the lives of four Americans. In that case, he intervened militarily and assisted in overthrowing the regime of Muammar Qaddafi, then pulled back when American facilities were attacked. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says the country is now a haven for terrorists. President Obama is now losing Syria. Rebels opposed to the Bashar al-Assad regime don’t have the weapons to fight Russian planes and tanks.

Veteran diplomat Dennis Ross is the latest observer to note that the policies of Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin seem to be the same. “Rather than being opposed to the Russian efforts, we look to be in league with them,” he writes in the Los Angeles Times.

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01/10/16

Benghazi Cover-up Challenged by New Film, More Hearings

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

One major aspect of the Benghazi cover-up has been to denounce the words of witnesses in favor of higher officials’ assertions. This is true not only for those CIA contractors who responded to the attacks, but also for the families of the victims.

In a recent interview with The Conway Daily Sun of New Hampshire, journalist Tom McLaughlin asked Hillary Clinton who, from among the attendees at the Andrews Air Force Base “transfer of remains ceremony,” was lying. He was referring to the family members of the four Americans killed during the terrorist attacks in Benghazi on September 11 and 12, 2012. Mrs. Clinton responded, “Not me, that’s all I can tell you.”

“Not, ‘no one is lying,’” criticized Megyn Kelley of Fox News in a segment with members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, the quick-reaction force whose story is the basis of the book that inspired this month’s forthcoming film, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. “Not, ‘let’s not impugn anyone’s motives here,’” added Kelly. “Not, ‘I reject the premise of your question.’”

Given that she has lied about virtually every aspect of Benghazi and her private email server, reporters ought to approach Mrs. Clinton’s claims with skepticism. Instead, The Washington Post continues to avoid calling Hillary Clinton on her lies even within its own Fact-Checker columns.

In October, Post Fact-Checker Glenn Kessler assigned two Pinocchios to presidential candidate Marco Rubio (R-FL) for calling Mrs. Clinton a liar for blaming the attacks on a YouTube video while simultaneously telling her daughter, Chelsea, the Egyptian prime minister, and Libya’s president that it was a terrorist attack.

“She certainly spoke about the video, but always in the context of the protests that were occurring across the Middle East,” wrote Kessler in October. In his latest fact check on January 4th, Kessler refused to assign blame to any party at all. The truth, he argues, cannot be found in the dispute between the families of the deceased and Mrs. Clinton.

“Perhaps it all started with a comment made by Rice (who two days later would famously go on national television and make a direct link between the video and the attack, thus spoiling her chance to become secretary of state),” writes Kessler. “Perhaps the question of who said what at what moment got jumbled over time. Or perhaps Clinton mentioned the video privately to just two people—and not to others.”

“Clearly we cannot come to a resolution that would be beyond dispute,” Kessler writes. Kessler is trying to insinuate that the family members of the victims have faulty memories of what happened when they met Mrs. Clinton. True, memories do shift over the years. That is why Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, has perhaps the most convincing story.

Woods provided Kessler with photographic evidence of his September 15, 2012 calendar entry about Mrs. Clinton’s statements. Woods also called in to the Lars Larson show just over a month after the attacks, on October 23, 2012, and told the radio host: “And she did not appear to be one bit sincere at all, and, you know, she mentioned that thing about, ‘We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.’” Shortly thereafter, he appeared on The Blaze making similar comments.

Woods also went on the One America News Network this week and challengedMrs. Clinton to take a lie detector test, along with him, to determine which one is telling the truth.

Townhall cites not two, but four, family members claiming that Mrs. Clinton is an outright liar. But, according to Kessler’s account, the family members claiming she told them about the video are only two: Patricia Smith, the mother of information officer Sean Smith—who died along with Ambassador Chris Stevens at the Special Mission Compound—and Woods.

The other family members—Barbara Doherty, Cheryl Croft Bennett, and Jan Stevens—Kessler writes, told him that Mrs. Clinton did not mention the video.

Kessler does admit that he did not speak to all of the family members. However, his treatment of Kate Quigley raises suspicions as to his overall method.

To add to the appearance of ambiguity, Kessler’s January 4th article casts Quigley, sister of the other deceased security contractor, Glenn Doherty, as having told him that Mrs. Clinton “made no mention of a video, but did refer to a ‘spontaneous protest.’”

In the previous month, according to Mediaite’s Alex Griswold, Quigley directly accused Mrs. Clinton of lying about blaming the attack on the video during the funeral.

“I know what she said to me and she can say all day long that she didn’t say it. That’s her cross to bear,” Quigley told Boston Herald Radio, according to Griswold. Patricia Smith also told the House Government Affairs Committee that a number of administration officials, from President Obama to Susan Rice to Hillary Clinton, all told her that the video was to blame.

What Kessler casts as anecdotal conjecture amounts to far more substance: it is congressional testimony, photographic evidence, and contemporaneous accounts. Yet Mrs. Clinton emerges unscathed from the Post not because she has admitted the truth, but because the liberal media remain loath to challenge her.

Instead, news organizations such as The Hill continue to claim that pursuing the truth behind the Benghazi attacks is a wasteful partisan anti-Hillary vendetta.

“Committee Republicans have long denied allegations that they are bent on a purely political mission to smear former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, rather than being motivated by a desire for the facts surrounding the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya,” reported The Hill’s Julian Hattem in his January 4th article covering the Select Committee on Benghazi’s latest round of closed door hearings. The Select Committee interviewed former CIA Director David Petraeus for the second time on Wednesday, and will interview former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Friday.

“Democrats have opposed the existence of the special committee since it was created in 2014,” Hattem reports. “Two GOP lawmakers and one former Republican committee staffer added fuel to the fire last year, by claiming that a core goal of the committee was to tear down Clinton’s presidential ambitions.” Wechallenged that claim at the time. Hattem also claimed that there was no “damning evidence” against Mrs. Clinton’s job performance and integrity from the October hearing.

No further evidence is necessary to implicate Mrs. Clinton in the Benghazi cover-up. She has deleted half of her emails, provided the State Department with altered messages, lied about having classified information on her private email server, and worked with the White House to blame an attack on a YouTube video while fully aware that this video had nothing to do with the Benghazi terror attacks. But the mainstream media are more concerned with ensuring that Hillary Clinton attains the presidency than vetting her as a candidate.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, appeared on Fox News on January 7th talking about the status of the hearings, the work of the Select Committee, and when he expects the committee to complete their work. Gowdy said that he is eager to wrap it up, having already interviewed 65 witnesses and received about 100,000 documents. He said, “I am waiting on documents from the White House, the CIA and the State Department.” He said that he believes he’s getting close, that he has about a dozen more witnesses to interview, and that he wants to wait for the remaining documents. In the end, Gowdy said that “I trust my fellow citizens to judge the full body of our work.”

I can assure Chairman Gowdy that we at the Citizens’ Commission on Benghaziwill be judging the full body of their work. But if they are waiting until all relevant documents are handed over, the Obama administration will surely run out the clock on them. As we have repeatedly documented, the key aspects of this multi-layered scandal are already well established and on the record. The challenge for the Select Committee is to effectively explain the Benghazi narrative in an environment where a hostile and corrupt news media will be attempting to dismiss and discredit their final report in an effort to protect and defend President Obama and Hillary Clinton.

12/5/15

Putin’s “War on Terror” Could Backfire

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

There can be no doubt that the Russians are winning the Middle East propaganda war. But it’s not just the Marxist far-left that is willing to believe whatever Vladimir Putin and his mouthpiece Russia Today (RT) are saying. Some conservatives and self-described Tea Party leaders have also accepted the disinformation the Russians are putting out, even to the extent of affirming the Russian president as a Christian statesman leading the global war on terror.

Consider Chuck Baldwin’s piece, “Rootin’ for Putin,” which insists that “Russia’s Vladimir Putin is the only one fighting a Just War in the Middle East right now.” Baldwin, a Christian pastor “dedicated to preserving the historic principles upon which America was founded,” was the presidential candidate in 2008 of the Constitution Party, a group associated with the late conservative icon Howard Phillips.

It is simply amazing that any conservative would insist that Putin, who, despite dropping the communist label is still allied with Iran, Communist China, North Korea and Cuba, is somehow doing the right thing in Syria, a long-time Soviet/Russian client state. What Putin is doing is entirely consistent with what the Soviets always did. They are trying to save a client state from what started out as a popular rebellion.

In his column, Baldwin went on to label Barack Obama, David Cameron of Britain, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey as “international gangsters.”

It is true that Obama, through a few of America’s Arab “allies,” has been supporting the cause of some jihadists and terrorists in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been implicated in these dangerous schemes, one of which culminated in the Benghazi massacre of four Americans in Libya. That was a treasonous action that should sink Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and could have justified impeachment charges against Obama himself. Mrs. Clinton was Obama’s Secretary of State at the time.

These operations in the Middle East have been characterized by former CIA officer Clare Lopez of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi as “switching sides in the War on Terror.”

But the idea that Putin has clean hands in the Middle East is absolutely ridiculous. Considering that he was a Soviet KGB spy and actually headed one of the KGB’s successor agencies, the idea that Putin has suddenly had a Damascus Road conversion to Christianity is simply ludicrous. His foreign policy is very similar to that of the old Soviet Union.

Since the foreign policy has mostly remained the same, Soviet financing and sponsorship of international terrorist networks, many of them linked to Arab and Muslim groups, also have to be taken into consideration here. It is reasonable to assume that the Russians have maintained at least parts of these networks for a purpose that we see in the backing of Bashar Assad in Syria. Indeed, writer and researcher Christian Gomez has traced the roots of ISIS to the Islamic Revival Party, created by the KGB, during the final days of the old Soviet Union. U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, a spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, has noted that the Russians are doing little in Syria to fight ISIS terrorists and that “Everything they [the Russians] are doing is to support Assad, to keep Assad in power.” In other words, Putin is continuing a clever Soviet-style strategy that seeks to maintain Assad in power while using ISIS for his own purposes. One of those purposes, as reflected in RT propaganda, is to make Putin look like a terrorist fighter.

Baldwin isn’t the only personality on the right duped by Putin and his propaganda machine. The CEO of a group calling itself simply the Tea Party has distributed an article claiming that Russia has produced “stunning photographic evidence” that ISIS oil was being smuggled into Turkey on an industrial scale.

The “stunning photographic evidence” shows nothing of the sort. Natasha Bertrand of Business Insider examined the Russian maps and found that the three main routes the Russians claim ISIS had allegedly been using to transport illicit oil into Turkey are not primarily controlled by the Islamic State. Turkish President Erdogan has countered: “Who is buying oil (from ISIS)? Let me say it. George Haswani, holder of a Russian passport and a Syrian national, is one of the biggest merchants in this business.” He noted that the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Haswani, who was also placed on an EU sanctions list, “for serving as middleman for oil purchases by the Syrian regime from the ISIS group.”

If you haven’t heard about the sanctions on the individuals and networks providing support to Syria and facilitating Syrian oil purchases from ISIS, you are a victim of the slick propaganda that is being spread around the world by such outlets as RT. It is a fact that the Russian claims against Turkey are taking precedence, even in the Western media, over the facts on the ground, as determined not only by the U.S. Treasury but the U.S. Army. Colonel Warren said, “We flatly reject any notion that the Turks are somehow working with ISIL,” he said. “That is preposterous.”

The “Tea Party” article about the Russian claims was lifted directly from the Infowars.com site of Russian apologist Alex Jones, who just scored a major interview with GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. No respectable Tea Party group should have anything to do with Alex Jones, who defended the Russian invasion of its former republic Georgia in 2008. Trump’s decision toappear on his show was extremely foolish. He apparently was not aware that Jones promotes claims that actual terrorist attacks, such as the Boston Marathon bombings carried out by two Muslims from Russia, were “false flags” perpetrated by U.S. police and law enforcement agencies. His website ran a “Voice of Russia”story claiming the dead and wounded were actors plastered with fake blood.

Rather than treat Putin as a good guy or ally, GOP presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio (FL) argues that Turkey is a member of NATO and an ally that “deserves the full backing of the United States.” He noted that the Russians were “targeting Turkmen-populated pockets of northern Syria rather than territory controlled by ISIS” and that “Most Russian military strikes since the end of September have been non-ISIS targets, including many civilian areas, revealing that Russia does not share our interest in confronting and defeating ISIS but instead is intent on propping up the Assad regime.”

Before he assumed the role as a leader of the Sunnis in the Middle East, mobilizing forces against Shite Iran and Syria, Erdogan was known for his anti-Soviet views. Indeed, he was an anti-communist in his youth. As a result of Russia’s increased military involvement in Syria, he seems to have awakened to the fact that Putin has returned to his Soviet roots and that Turkey’s future lies with NATO and the West. Turkey joined NATO, originally conceived as an anti-Soviet military alliance, in 1952.

Assuming Erdogan is an Islamist of some kind, as some conservatives contend, it might make strategic sense for the West to back him for that reason alone in his battle with Russia. After all, most of Russia’s 14 million Muslims are Sunnis. RT itself recently highlighted how thousands of Muslims had gathered in central Moscow “to witness the opening of one of the biggest mosques in Europe.” The ceremony was attended by Putin and Erdogan, who had been considered to be on friendly terms.

Their relationship turned sour after Turkey shot down the Russian war plane, and it seems to be deteriorating further.

As noted by Ilya Arkhipov of Bloomberg Business, Putin used his annual state-of-the-nation address to attack Turkey and Erdogan in very personal and religious terms. Putin said, “Only Allah knows why they did this. And it seems that Allah decided to punish the ruling gang in Turkey by stripping it of common sense and reason.” Analyst Timothy Ash told Bloomberg that “The religious angle being used by Putin is unlikely to go down well in the region, where Erdogan is still seen as a defender of the Sunni faith.”

One observer has noted, in regard to Russian involvement in Arab/Muslim terrorism and now ISIS, that the monster that the USSR created may have grown too big, and that it may eventually attack its creator.  In the case of Turkey, Putin is facing a Muslim problem of his own making.

12/1/15

Fresh Perspectives on Benghazi Keep the Scandals Alive

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

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.