08/29/15

You know who’s not #ReadyForHillary? The thousands who’ve died fleeing the Libya she destroyed

Hillary Clinton is directly responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the Mediterranean Sea as the death toll of those who drowned fleeing her destabilized Libya approaches 2,500.

Rescue workers counted dozens of victims Friday from the increasingly desperate tide of humanity sweeping into Europe fleeing war, oppression and poverty. Austrian police said 71 people likely suffocated in an airless truck and authorities estimated 200 people drowned off the Libyan coast when two overloaded boats bound for Europe capsized…

…The International Office of Migration has recorded 2,432 deaths linked to Mediterranean crossings this year, but countless more have vanished beneath the waves out of sight of rescuers. The official count was set to rise Friday as authorities counted the dead from three shipwrecks off the Libyan coast.

Two ships went down on Thursday alone off the western Libyan city of Zuwara. Hussein Asheini of Libya’s Red Crescent, said at least 105 bodies had been recovered, adding: “a coast guard team is still diving in and checking inside to see if there’s anyone else.”

Say, Doug, isn’t it unfair to pin these deaths on Hillary?

Well, let’s put it this way. Hillary was eager to take credit for destabilizing Libya when Muammar Gaddafi was executed in 2011:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared a laugh with a television news reporter moments after hearing deposed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had been killed.

“We came, we saw, he died,” she joked when told of news reports of Qaddafi’s death by an aide in between formal interviews.

Clinton was in Tripoli earlier this week for talks with leaders of Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC).

The reporter asked if Qaddafi’s death had anything to do with her surprise visit to show support for the Libyan people.

Now, as the mouthpiece of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy known as The New Yorker reported earlier this month, Hillary’s masterwork has resulted in the rise of ISIS in Libya:

The wars in Syria and Iraq continue to dominate international headlines, but a growing stream of news offers reminders that Libya is in a state of meltdown. In Cairo on Sunday, John Kerry said he had discussed the need for “increased border cooperation” along Egypt’s long, mostly unguarded Libyan border. Tunisia has begun building a security wall along its own hundred-and-four-mile-long border with Libya.

For months, ISIS has been trumpeting its abduction and execution of African Christians in Libya. In February, a slick, ghoulish video showed twenty-one Egyptian hostages in orange jumpsuits being led along a beach by black-masked executioners, who forced them to kneel and then cut off their heads. In April, another video appeared, showing the execution of twenty-nine Ethiopians in Libya. Gunmen who trained with ISIS in Libya were involved in the murder of twenty foreign tourists, at a Tunis museum in March, and thirty-eight more tourists, most of them British, at a seaside resort in Tunisia in June. These attacks focused attention on the fact that Libya, a vast, oil-rich, underpopulated country with a long southern-Mediterranean coastline, has become part of the self-proclaimed ISIS caliphate.

In a parallel phenomenon, armed trafficking gangs in Libya are driving most of Africa’s illegal immigration across the Mediterranean to Europe. As many as a hundred and seventy thousand are thought to have made the crossing last year, with thousands dying en route. Unprecedented numbers are continuing to cross this year, taking advantage of the chaos in Libya.

Hillary’s email exploits are getting the headlines, and deservedly so for actions that would have sent a lesser mortal to prison long ago, but no one is discussing her complicity in crimes against humanity.

One other odd point: I don’t hear the word “chickenhawk” bandied about when these Democrat politicians bloviate about “their” military achievements. I wonder why that is?

Hat tip: BadBlue Gun News.

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.

02/27/15

More Smoking Guns Confirm Benghazi Cover-up

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

We have repeatedly exposed how the mainstream media consistently ignore the “phony scandal” of the multiple terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya in 2012, and the unnecessary deaths of four brave Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Indeed, the mainstream media shy away from covering this scandal or, alternatively, dismiss efforts to expose the ongoing government cover-up as an attack on Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances.

But the media should be furious because they—alongside of the American public—were sold a lie by the Obama administration. And the media became one of the tools through which that lie was disseminated. The latest disclosures have come to light thanks to the ongoing efforts of Judicial Watch.

Document after released document shows that the Secretary of State, the Defense Secretary, the head of AFRICOM, and the President of the United States himself, were informed, shortly after the attack began, that Benghazi was an attack by terrorists. Yet most of the media, such as New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick, defensively maintain the official narrative years later that the attack “was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”

“The Regional Security Officer reports the diplomatic mission is under attack. Tripoli reports approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well,” states an email forwarded to Cheryl Mills, Secretary Clinton’s chief of staff at the time, as well as Clinton’s deputy chief-of-staff for policy and her executive assistant. It is dated September 11, 2012 at 4:07 p.m. EST—about a half hour after the attack in Benghazi began. The argument that senior State Department personnel did not inform their direct superior, Mrs. Clinton, of the facts surrounding the unfolding situation strains credulity.

“State Department emails released through a lawsuit by Judicial Watch show that then-Secretary Hillary Clinton knew as the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi was under way that it was being carried out by terrorists,” reports Jerome Corsi for WorldNetDaily. Yet, “Clinton blamed the attack on ‘rage and violence over an awful Internet video’” just days later when “she spoke at a ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base on Sept. 14, 2014” as the remains of those slain returned to the U.S. She also made similar assertions on September 12, 2012.

Andrew McCarthy, writing for National Review, connected the dots, detailing the anatomy of the attempted cover-up.

While the attacks were still going on, “Secretary Clinton issued an official statement claiming the assault may have been in ‘response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet,’” McCarthy writes. He continues, “Secretary Clinton’s statement took pains to add that ‘the United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others’—further intimating that the video was the cause of the attack. I have previously recounted that this official Clinton statement was issued shortly after 10 p.m.—minutes after President Obama and Secretary Clinton spoke briefly on the telephone about events in Benghazi, according to Clinton’s congressional testimony. The White House initially denied that Obama had spoken with Clinton or other top cabinet officials that night. The president’s version of events changed after Secretary Clinton’s testimony.”

The new emails from Judicial Watch also show that Clinton’s top officials were trying to get third parties to echo false information that they were fully aware was incorrect, according to the group’s President Tom Fitton, who spoke at a press briefing on February 26. And they stopped talking to the press so that statements about the video would receive more coverage.

Mills asked the State Department to stop answering press inquiries after Mrs. Clinton’s statement about “inflammatory material posted on the Internet” was “hanging out there,” writing, “Can we stop answering emails for the night Toria [Victoria Nuland] b/c now the first one is hanging out there.”

Fitton also said that the released emails leave no doubt that Clinton’s closest advisors knew the basic facts about Benghazi immediately, and that Clinton knowingly lied about the YouTube video’s role in Benghazi. He cited the failure of the media to have any curiosity about this issue and condemned Congress for not holding the administration more accountable.

The Select Committee on Benghazi contacted Judicial Watch a day before the press briefing regarding its documents and specialized knowledge about Benghazi, said Fitton. Yet the Select Committee began interviewing State Department officials earlier this month, without these documents.

The cover-up by the administration, including by Mrs. Clinton, has only become more apparent with the release of Judicial Watch’s most recent “smoking gun” emails from the State Department. Will the media continue to look the other way in an attempt to save Mrs. Clinton’s reputation and her White House bid, or will it finally begin to demand real accountability? Unfortunately, I think we already know the answer to that, leaving it up to Rep. Trey Gowdy’s (R-SC) committee, and groups like Judicial Watch, and our Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi.