Tag Archives: Benghazi

U.S. Policy of Sensitive Disclosures to the Chinese Is Unprecedented

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With Pete Hoekstra, Joseph Humire, Catherine Herridge, Gordon Chang

Former Congressman PETE HOEKSTRA addresses the Administration’s policies for relinquishing US leadership in the areas of space, weapons and technology.

JOSEPH HUMIRE, author of the upcoming book “Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America,” describes foreign influence in Venezuela. In particular, he looks at the benefits Iran and Cuba get from supporting the Maduro regime, and the increasing militarization of Venezuelan “colectivo” groups.

CATHERINE HERRIDGE, Chief Intelligence Correspondent for Fox News, critiques Mike Morell’s “Benghazi talking points” testimony from last week’s hearing before the House Intelligence Committee.

Contending that U.S. China policies are rooted in misapprehensions, GORDON CHANG, of Forbes.com and World Affairs Journal, outlines the unprecedented U.S. disclosure of sensitive information to the Chinese.

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Morell Hurt CIA’s Reputation in Benghazi Hearing

Republican Senators John McCain, Lindey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte put it best yesterday in a joint statement they issued in response to former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell’s testimony yesterday to the House Intelligence Committee:

“This looks an awful lot like misleading the Congress.”

It’s hard to come to any other conclusion after watching Morell squirm for three hours as he explained CIA’s drafting of talking points a week after the attacks on the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi.  The final version of these talking points were used by Ambassador Susan Rice on September 16, 2012 to deny that the attacks were related to terrorism and to instead claim they were the result of a spontaneous demonstration in response to an anti-Muslim video.

This explanation was politically convenient six weeks ahead of the 2012 presidential election and helped President Obama defend his dubious campaign theme that because of his leadership, Osama bin Laden was dead and al Qaeda was on the run.

During the hearing, Morell denied altering the talking points for political reasons.  He said he sided with CIA analysts who believed the attacks were in response to a demonstration and the anti-Muslim video even though the CIA Libya station chief told him there was no demonstration and that he believed the attacks were an act of terrorism.

Morell tried to convey that relying on career CIA analysts – even though they were thousands of miles away from the Benghazi attack – was a responsible decision that had nothing to do with politics.

This is nonsense.  Having worked as a CIA analyst for 19 years, I can attest that the lower levels of the CIA analysis bureaucracy know exactly what their managers want.  They know the line they need to take to get promoted and to earn bonuses.  Moreover, the analysis side of the house is well known for its liberal political bias and for being gun-shy in drawing politically controversial conclusions since the 9/11 and Iraq WMD intelligence failures.

Maybe Morell didn’t alter the talking points for the White House because he didn’t have to – his analysts and managers knew what he and the White House expected.  Regardless of who was responsible for drafting and altering the talking points, we now know Morell approved them even though he knew the senior CIA officer in Libya had a very different view.  He also knew the memo he approved said exactly what the White House wanted to hear.

Morell made many other head-spinning statements, such as his claim that we can’t know the motivations of the attackers since we haven’t caught them yet.  He said the events on September 11, 2012 were both a terrorist attack and a protest.

Morell also said he took out the word “Islamic” in a sentence that described the attackers as “Islamic extremists” because he did not want to fuel anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world.  This was a policy call and was politically convenient for the White House which has been extremely reluctant to use the terms “Islamic” or Islamist” in describing terrorists or terrorist attacks.

This was a bad day for the CIA since Morell’s testimony will further undermine the Agency’s reputation as a non-political and objective source of information on national security matters.  Morell was right when he said the CIA probably should not have been involved in drafting unclassified talking points.  If there was a compelling reason for the CIA to engage in such a task, CIA managers had a responsibility to be politically neutral and not ignore inconvenient facts like reports by the Libya Chief of Station.

Center launches new Intelligence Brief series

Center for Security Policy Senior Fellows bring of wealth of skills and experience to Center programs and initiatives.  Two of those, Fred Fleitz and Clare Lopez, have applied their expertise to a new video project.  Fleitz served in U.S. national security positions for 25 years at the CIA, DIA, Department of State and the House Intelligence Committee staff, while Lopez is a former 20-year career operations officer with the CIA, and a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies.  Find their first two intelligence briefs below:

The Benghazi Coverup and the Politicization of Intelligence

See also Benghazi and the Politicization of Intelligence by Clare Lopez

NSA Metadata Program and Internet Monitoring

See also A Critique of President Obama’s Reforms of U.S. Intelligence

Benghazi and the Politicization of Intelligence

As we now know, within about 15 minutes after the start of the attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound (SMC) in Benghazi on 11 September 2012, top U.S. civilian and uniformed officials were informed that it was a terrorist attack. The information was clear, unambiguous, and remained consistent over the chaotic hours that followed. It did not change. If anything, the exceptionally accurate final mortar strike on the CIA Annex that took the lives of former Navy SEALs Glenn Doherty and Ty Woods, and gravely injured others, provided conclusive evidence of a carefully pre-planned attack. There is simply no room for equivocation on this: it was a well-organized, military-style assault by terrorists armed with assault rifles, RPGs, and eventually a mortar.

Mike Morell, then-head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), had the task of helping to prepare talking points for then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, who was slated to appear on five Sunday morning talk shows a few days later. Morell was personally responsible for “cutting some 50 percent of the text,” including all “references to Al Qaeda” and the many earlier terror attacks against U.S. and other Western targets in Benghazi. When the Senate Intelligence Committee finally succeeded in prying loose the emails that had flowed back and forth to the CIA, State Department and the White House during the talking points editing process, it was clear that Morell not only had misrepresented his own role, but also had been less than forthcoming about the close oversight role played by the White House in ensuring that all references to al-Qa’eda terrorism would be scrubbed. Morell also made sure to scrub from the talking points the honest assessment that “We cannot rule out that individuals had previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

With the President in a close re-election race and touting the obviously inaccurate meme that al-Qa’eda was on the run and close to defeat, it wouldn’t have helped to admit that Islamic terrorists, after what was likely weeks of planning and rehearsal, had just overrun a U.S. diplomatic post in North Africa and killed four Americans. Better to obfuscate until the election was safely behind them. Besides, “What difference does it make?” that the most senior officials of the U.S. government deliberately subverted the intelligence process as long as it helped ensure the President’s re-election?

Nearly as troubling as Morell’s misleading congressional testimony was the overwhelming silence from senior Defense Department officials, who also knew full well that Susan Rice’s talk-show narrative was false—and yet remained silent. Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers (MI) indicated on 27 February 2014 that Morell likely will be called back to clarify his testimony.

There is no doubt that top officials at the Defense Department knew almost immediately that the Benghazi attack was a terrorist attack—and given the stream of reporting about al-Qa’eda’s increasingly aggressive behavior during the months leading up to the 11 September 2012 final attack, also should have had few doubts about who was responsible. According to closed door classified testimony on 26 June 2013 before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, AFRICOM commander Gen. Carter Ham (who happened to be in the Pentagon that night) immediately told Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Gen. Martin Dempsey about the attack, saying that it was unambiguously a terrorist attack. The two of them—Panetta, and Dempsey—then departed from the Pentagon together for a previously-scheduled meeting with President Obama at the White House.

Even as these Defense officials were briefing the President on what was happening in Benghazi, telling him that the U.S. Ambassador to Tripoli, Christopher Stevens, was missing, the same information about the attack was reaching the Pentagon and key combatant commands, all of which were told the same thing: it was a terrorist attack. Later that night, Greg Hicks, the Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) in Tripoli, spoke by phone with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other top State Department advisors, telling them that he feared Ambassador Stevens might be in the clutches of terrorists at a Benghazi hospital and that he was concerned about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli as well. He soon learned from the Libyan prime minister that Stevens was dead, and relayed that information to the State Department at around 9 p.m. Washington time. But there was still nothing about a video. Nothing at all.

Then came the 10 p.m. phone call from the President to Secretary of State Clinton—the person that almost no one (except Andrew McCarthy here) mentions. This was the 10 p.m. phone call that White House spokesman Jay Carney reluctantly mentioned on 20 February 2013 in response to questions from the press corps. According to CNS News, the President called Clinton “to get an update on the situation.” It was right afterward that Clinton released a statement linking the attacks to “inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” a reference to “The Innocence of Muslims” YouTube film trailer. As it turned out, that deliberately duplicitous initial reference to a video that had nothing to do with the attack on the Benghazi SMC presaged a full two weeks of false statements from President Obama, Secretary Clinton, White House spokesman Jay Carney, and others about the film clip.

Neither Morell, nor any other top Obama administration official, has any excuse for not knowing the attack was a terrorist attack, or for thinking somehow that a demonstration or protests had preceded it. According to FOX News journalist Catherine Herridge, a report from the CIA’s own senior officer on the ground in Tripoli, Libya confirmed in a 15 September 2012 email that the attack was “not/not an escalation of protests,” but rather a coordinated terror attack. That email was received by Morell, CIA Director David Petraeus, and other senior CIA officials a full day before Susan Rice was sent out to broadcast false information to the American people on the 16 September Sunday talk shows.

But Morell still wasn’t coming clean on everything. In November 2012, Morell was once again before the House Intelligence Committee, along with Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, and CTC Chief Matt Olsen. When asked who had been responsible for the talking points, Clapper said that he had no idea, while Morell remained silent. In another meeting that took place in late 2012, Morell again seemed to have trouble telling the truth. He and Rice met with Senators Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), John McCain (R-AZ), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Under questioning from the senators about the talking-points editing process, Morell tried to blame the FBI for cutting the reference to al-Qa’eda terrorism; he said the FBI didn’t want to compromise an ongoing criminal investigation. When Graham called the FBI and told them what Morell had said, “they went ballistic,” Graham said in an interview with Fox News. Confronted with this, Morell changed his statement and admitted that he, and the CIA, had been responsible after all.

Confusion in the early hours, and even early days, following a chaotic situation such as that which confronted U.S. leadership on 11 September 2012 would be understandable. But it is the certain knowledge that our most senior civilian, intelligence, and military officers deliberately and repeatedly lied, including before Congress, about what they knew at the time to be a terrorist attack on our mission by al-Qa’eda jihadis that so corrodes Americans’ trust in their leadership. This is particularly damaging because there is the appearance of a coordinated cover-up staged to ensure the re-election of a President who’d staked his campaign on the repeated assertion that al-Qa’eda had been “decimated,” or was on “the path to defeat.”

In July 2013, Mike Morell joined the consulting firm of Beacon Global Strategies LLC, which had been founded not long beforehand by four others with close ties to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: Michael Allen, Jeremy Bash, Philippe Reines, and Andrew Shapiro (who was the Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs from 2009-2013, with responsibility for security relationships with U.S. Middle East partners).

Benghazi was a planned tragedy

The recent reports by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Armed Services Committee make clear that no organization in the chain of command, including the White House, should have been surprised by the tragic events that occurred at our Benghazi Special Mission Compound (SMC) on Sept. 11, 2012.

Clearly, there was both strategic and tactical warnings.

The security situation in eastern Libya, particularly Benghazi, was out of control. Trying to explain our failure to protect the SMC as a lack of appreciation of the seriousness of the deteriorating security situation or incompetence does not pass muster. This was a planned event and explains the massive cover-up.

There were numerous hostile acts leading up to the attack on the compound. For example, on April 6, 2012, an attack with improvised explosive devices was conducted on the outer wall of the compound.

On May 22, the Benghazi International Red Cross office was hit by two rocket-propelled grenades. On June 1, a car bomb exploded outside the Benghazi hotel where the British ambassador was staying. On June 6, an IED blew a hole in the compound’s perimeter wall. On June 7, Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens requested two mobile security teams for his protection but was denied by the State Department.

On June 11, the British ambassador’s convoy was hit by RPGs. On June 17, the U.K. closes its Benghazi consulate, and the International Red Cross closes its office. On June 19, the Tunisian Consulate is stormed by the rebel group Ansar al Shariah.

Then on July 9, the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli requests continued security support for an additional 60 days, but receives no answer from the State Department.

On Aug. 2, Stevens requests 11 additional personal-security bodyguards. He calls the security situation unpredictable and violent, but his requests are turned down by State. Stevens sent a cable to State on Aug, 16 stating that the compound cannot withstand a coordinated attack.

The State Department’s reaction was to withdraw the three Quick Reaction Units at our embassy in Tripoli under the command of Col. Andy Wood over the objection of the embassy and Col. Wood.

At this point, AFRICOM offers to provide additional security, but Stevens feels compelled to turn down the offer owing to State denying all his requests for increased security.

The State Department turning down all of Stevens‘ requests for increased security as well as drawing down security assets in country is more than puzzling, particularly since an internal State Department analysis completed two months after the compound opened stated that unless security was increased, the compound should be closed. This assessment is buried in the Accountability Review Board (ARB) report.

The question that needs to be answered is, with the out-of-control security situation in eastern Libya, why were there no contingency plans or forces pre-positioned ready to respond to potential attacks on the anniversary of 9/11?

According to one report, the administration was focused on Tunisia, not Libya. Mind-boggling. Nonetheless, if that were the case, where were the forces positioned to respond to an attack on Tunisia?

On the day of the attack, according to a report in The Guardian, the readiness of the ambassador’s five-member security detail raises questions. Three of the four agents with Stevens, according to the report, left their rifles, helmets and body armor in another area under orders by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, which was confirmed by the ARB report.

This makes no sense, given that standard operating procedures in a hostile environment require that weapon be kept at the ready all times. Another question that needs to be answered: Why would the secretary of state give such an order?

Based on numerous reports, the Obama administration and every organization in the chain of command knew almost instantly that this was a terrorist attack on the SMC.

Within hours, it was known that the attack was executed by Ansar al Shariah, which is a coalition of Islamic and Salafist rebel groups linked to al Qaeda, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and the February 17th Martyrs Brigade.

It should not be overlooked that the February 17th Martyrs Brigade was tasked with supporting the U.K.-based Blue Mountain Security Group that had the contract from our State Department to provide security for the compound.

According to my source, who is a confidential informant for the FBI, the Blue Mountain Security Group is a cover company for MI-6. My source also told me that the February 17 Martyrs Brigade contract personnel were positioned near the compound the day of the attack and were ready to respond but never received orders to execute. Interesting.

My FBI confidential informant has also confirmed my assessment on the Lou Dobbs TV show in October 2012; namely, that this was an operation that went terribly wrong.

According to my source’s in-country contacts, there never was any intention to kill Stevens. He was supposed to be kidnapped and held as a hostage in exchange for the release of the blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman. It should be recalled that this was the No. 1 objective of then-Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in his Washington visit in 2012.

All the unanswered questions and the truth of what actually took place at our Benghazi compound that cost the lives of four Americans can only be resolved by the formation of a special committee with subpoena powers.

House Speaker John A. Boehner, appoint such a committee as called for by Resolution 36 put forth by Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, and restore integrity to the office of the speaker.

Still Searching for the Truth on Benghazi

With Catherine Herridge, Andrew McCarthy, Peter Brookes, Matthew Continetti

FOX News Channel’s Chief Intelligence correspondent CATHERINE HERRIDGE details what former CIA deputy director Michael Morell knew about the 9/11 Benghazi attack in its immediate aftermath, and how that intelligence compared with the official talking points produced by the government.

ANDREW McCARTHY of National Review Online covers the continuing drip of intelligence on the Al Qaeda threat in both Benghazi and Cairo in September of 2012 that was well known at the time and difficult to confuse with the now well debunked YouTube narrative pushed by the White House.

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs PETER BROOKES describes the strategic interest of Vladamir Putin in Ukraine and the current Sino-Russian military and diplomatic relationship with some brief historical background.

Founder and editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon MATT CONTINETTI compares the Obama Administration’s belief that the world is now less dangerous to the foolhardy belief of the Titanic’s builders that they had created an unsinkable ship.

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U.S. Lifts Ban on Immigrants With Links to Terrorism

Muslim Brotherhood affiliates scored a major victory in their efforts to degrade U.S. national security measures in early February 2014 when the Obama administration decided to override by fiat portions of the U.S. Criminal Code and immigration policy pertaining to individuals who provide “material support to terrorism.”

As published in the Federal Register on February 5, 2014, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State issued a joint notice that, henceforth, certain asylum seekers and refugees who only provided “limited material support” to terrorism would be allowed into the U.S.

The earlier law as written, The Real ID Law of 2005, states quite explicitly that the definition of engaging in terrorist activity includes:

To commit an act that the actor knows, or reasonably should know, affords material support, including a safe house, transportation, communications, funds, transfer of funds or other material financial benefit … to a terrorist organization [emphasis added]

Such activity, no matter how minor, constituted grounds for exclusion from entry to the U.S.

By unilaterally lifting restrictions — without so much as consulting Congress — for those intending immigrants who engaged in “(1) certain routine commercial transactions or certain routine social transactions (i.e., in the satisfaction of certain well-established or verifiable family, social, or cultural obligations), [or] (2) certain humanitarian assistance,” that benefited terrorist organizations, the Obama administration simply overrode existing law. So far, both the judicial and legislative branches of the U.S. government have let the administration get away with it.

According to the Daily Caller, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and Secretary of State John Kerry signed the exemptions despite very real concerns about the legality of the executive branch deciding to ignore aspects of an existing law it doesn’t want to enforce and replacing them with its own guidelines.

Former State Department official and current director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies Jessica Vaughan worried as well that “those evaluating these cases will be ordered to ignore red flags in the applications, especially if the applicant is supported by one of the many advocacy groups that have the ear of senior DHS staff.”

The new policy decree marks a significant win for agents of influence belonging to advocacy groups acting on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood agenda to pursue “civilization jihad” “to destroy Western civilization from within…by [our] hands,” as asserted in the “Explanatory Memorandum,” a key Brotherhood document introduced as evidence in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.

As described at some length in “The Islamists’—and their Enablers’—Assault on the Right: The Case Against Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan,” an February 11, 2014 dossier of particulars published by the Center for Security Policy (CSP), it is precisely in executing political influence operations aimed at U.S. national security leadership (whether Republican or Democratic) that the Muslim Brotherhood so excels.

The CSP paper explains in exhaustive detail and with meticulously referenced citations how the Muslim Brotherhood targeted the Republican Party and the conservative movement over a period of years and succeeded in placing senior operatives such as Abdurahman Alamoudi, Sami al-Arian, Nihad Awad, and Khaled Saffuri deep inside senior leadership circles.

It was at those top levels of government—the Executive Branch, the Intelligence Community, and the National Security Council—where critical decision-making took place, especially in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, that set U.S. counterterrorism strategy on a hopeless loop that deliberately avoided, and indeed later would forbid, knowledge about Islamic doctrine, law and scripture as the animating inspiration for Islamic terrorism.

By divorcing the enemy’s core ideology from study of the enemy threat doctrine, Muslim Brotherhood agents of influence succeeded in ensuring that U.S. blood and treasure would be endlessly and fruitlessly expended in Counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare, nation-building exercises and democracy experiments in the most unsuitable places possible: Muslim lands under rule of Islamic law (sharia).

As noted in CSP’s 2010 Team B II Report, “Shariah: The Threat to America,” Americans do pretty well at defending against military-style frontal assaults. We do far less well, though, at either recognizing or countering the “menace posed by jihadist enemies who operate by deceit and stealth from inside the gates.”

And yet it is the latter threat that poses a far more serious threat to open, tolerant societies like ours than the openly terrorist attack like the one that struck on 9/11.

As cited by CSP’s Norquist and Khan report, the Washington Post described the stealthy operating style of the Muslim Brotherhood in a revealing September 11, 2004 front page article, “In Search of Friends Among the Foes.”

Juan Zarate, then-chief of the Treasury Department’s terror finance unit, admitted confusion about the Brotherhood and how it operated through familiar Western business enterprises but with Islamic “philosophy and ultimate objectives” that are antithetical to our own. Through a disciplined strategy and patient willingness to work under the radar for decades, they progress towards specific goals and, ultimately, “conquest through dawah,” as Yousef al-Qaradawi, senior jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood, has put it.

So it has been with the steady campaign to chip away at U.S. counterterrorism legislation and policy, much of it, like the Patriot Act, implemented in the months and years following 9/11.

In his 2007 book, “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated America,” Paul Sperry noted, for instance, that, by securing key positions within the White House, such as the Office of Public Liaison, for Brotherhood operatives like Suhail Khan, access by various Islamic organizations could be controlled.

Likewise, the appointment of Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Muslim Brotherhood front organization in the country, to the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group in 2010, served to place a top Brotherhood operative in a key position from which to influence U.S. counterterrorism policy.

In July 2012, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, joined by four other courageous Representatives, sent letters to the Inspectors General of the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State plus the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, requesting each to investigate the extent of Muslim Brotherhood influence in these respective agencies.

Rep. Bachmann followed up with a sixteen-page letter to Rep. Keith Ellison (who had criticized the investigation request) in which she laid out documented instances of apparent Muslim Brotherhood influence over U.S. policy. These included Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s February 2011 testimony before Congress, in which he described the openly jihadist Muslim Brotherhood as “secular;” drastic, pro-Brotherhood policy initiatives by the State Department, during a period when Huma Abedin, who had been closely involved with the Muslim Brotherhood for years, served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton; and U.S. cooperation with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on a pro-sharia campaign to criminalize the criticism of Islam.

With the 2011-2012 government-wide Great Purge of training curriculum related to fact-based instruction about Islam followed by the wholesale backing for the al-Qa’eda and Muslim Brotherhood-led revolts in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, U.S. policy is far gone along the pathway of acquiescence to a jihad and sharia agenda. When Hani Nour Eldin, member of Gama’at al-Islamiyya, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, was granted a visa in June 2012 to visit the White House in order to petition the National Security Council for the release of Omar Abdel Rahman (the Blind Sheikh), the warning indicators were already well in evidence that the Obama administration was turning the Global War on Terror policy on its head.

Allowing political asylees and refugees known to have provided material support to terrorism to enter the country is yet one more milestone step bringing U.S. policy into closer compliance with sharia objectives—to our great detriment.  

What the News Media Missed in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Benghazi Report

Last month’s Senate Intelligence Committee report on the September 2012 terrorist attacks against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi made headlines for its bipartisan conclusions that the attacks could have been prevented and for citing four al-Qaeda groups that were involved in the attacks or contributed participants.  While some of the report was debatable and watered-down, its findings are significant and further discredits the Obama Administration’s contention that the attacks were the result of demonstrations outside the consulate due to an anti-Muslim video.
 
Although it is an important bipartisan report on the Benghazi tragedy, reading the whole report carefully indicates much less agreement than the committee’s Democratic majority and the news media have claimed and suggests the report only got out the door after committee members agreed to discuss their substantial disagreements in an “additional views” appendix.  The report’s additional views are far more interesting than the body of the report and reflect the continuing wide partisan differences over the Benghazi tragedy and the Obama administration’s refusal to fully cooperate with congressional investigations of the attacks.
 
Additional views are not unusual for congressional reports and are usually part of Senate Intelligence committee reports.  The Benghazi report included additional views by the Democratic majority, by the committee’s Republican members (except for Senator Susan Collins), and a separate set of additional views by Collins.
 
The committee’s Democratic members submitted five pages of additional views that preview how Hillary Clinton is certain to respond to criticism about her handling of the Benghazi attacks if she runs for president: the controversy over this tragedy is political, has been generated by “misinformed speculation and accusations” and it is time to move on.
 
The Democratic additional views focus on the infamous talking points about the Benghazi attacks provided to the intelligence committees on September 15, 2012, claiming that they were “flawed but mostly accurate.”  This document, initially drafted by the CIA and cleared through several government agencies and senior Obama officials at the National Security Council, was used by Ambassador Susan Rice on Sunday morning talk shows on September 16th and echoed by Obama officials for weeks.  The talking points said the consulate attacks were due to demonstrations stemming from an anti-Muslim video. 
 
The committee’s Democratic members blamed the CIA for inaccurate information in the talking points and said the CIA – not the NSC – removed references to al-Qaeda prior to sending the document around for inter-agency clearance.  They concluded that there were no efforts by the White House or others in the Executive Branch to cover-up facts or make alterations for political purposes. 
 
The Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats had to overlook a lot of inconvenient facts to come to such conclusions.
 
By contrast, in their 16-pages of additional views, six of the seven Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee present alternative views that are a powerful indictment of how the Obama administration mishandled the Benghazi tragedy and its efforts to cover-up the facts of the attacks before the November 2012 election.  The most important sentence of the Republican additional views is this:
 
“Many of us were frustrated and astounded by the great pains the Administration took after the attacks to avoid the clear linkage of what happened in Benghazi to the threat from international terrorism.” 
Concerning the talking points, the six Republicans found that the administration took steps to mislead Congress and the American people about the Benghazi attacks and the threat from al-Qaeda before the 2012 election.
 
“Rather than provide Congress with the best intelligence and on-the-ground assessments, the Administration chose to try to frame the story in a way that minimized any connection to terrorism.  Before the Benghazi attacks—in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, the administration continued to script the narrative that al-Qaeda had been decimated and on the run.  The Benghazi terrorist attacks inconveniently, and overwhelmingly, interfered with this fictitious and false narrative.”  
The additional views by the six Republicans rejected the charge that the CIA was at fault for erroneous language in the talking points, noting that emails reluctantly released to the committee clearly show the White House was asked to coordinate on the talking points from the earliest moments and had the final say in approving them.  The Republican members noted that this does not comport with what Acting CIA Director Morell told the intelligence committees in November 2012.
 
“. . . in spite of his [CIA Director Petraeus] own misgivings, the final content of the talking points was the ‘[National Security Staff’s] call, to be sure.’  In contrast, the Acting Director’s testimony perpetuated the myth that the White House played no part in the drafting or editing of the talking points.” 
This observation by the six Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans are supported by a Feb. 4 story by Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge that Morell – who is now a member of a Washington, DC consulting firm with close ties to Hillary Clinton – may have altered the Benghazi talking points to benefit the Obama administration before the November 2012 election by removing the word “Islamic” but keeping the word “demonstration.” 
 
The committee Democrats complained in their additional views that “controversy over the CIA talking points consumed a regrettable and disproportionate amount of time during the committee’s substantive review of the Benghazi attacks.”  Of course the Democrats said this because they were trying to paper over and shift the blame for an unprecedented and brazen scheme by the Obama Administration to manipulate the facts about the Benghazi attacks to ensure this tragedy did not prevent Mr Obama from being reelected.  The six Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans are to be given credit for not mincing their words about this abuse of the American people’s trust by President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other senior Obama officials. 
 
The six committee Republicans had several other devastating criticisms of the Obama Administration concerning the Benghazi tragedy that have received little attention by the news media.  These include:
  • A complete absence of accountability.  The body of the report says nothing about holding White House, State Department, and Pentagon officials accountable for the Benghazi tragedy and devotes only one page to the failure to bring the attackers to justice.  The additional views by the six committee Republicans are sharply critical of the Obama Administration over these failures and notes that “the final responsibility for security at diplomatic compounds rests with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”  Not only have key officials not been held accountable, the Republicans said “a strong case can be made that State engaged in retaliation against witnesses who were willing to speak with Congress” and that witnesses such as Charlene Lamb [Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Programs] who were shielded from or avoided committee requests for interviews were returned to duty.  An excellent majority staff report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued on Feb. 7 “Benghazi: Where is the Accountability?” makes these same points in greater depth.
  • Unknowns remain due to the Obama Administration’s obstructionism.  The additional views by the six Republicans detail how White House and State Department officials appeared to do everything possible to block the committee’s investigation.  This included blocking access to witnesses and documents, abusing executive privilege, and playing games with committee jurisdiction rules.  The committee Republicans noted how for seven months the Obama administration refused to provide the full paper trail for the talking points and instead provided a “re-creation” of the drafts to which it only gave the committee limited, “read only” access.  Because of this obstructionism, the six committee Republicans said important issues still need to be addressed to assess why Americans died in Benghazi and why no one has been held accountable.  The Republicans believe this needs to be investigated by “a committee that can and will use subpoena authority to obtain information from an uncooperative State Department.”  In my opinion, a House special committee to do this is long overdue.  Speaker Boehner should approve one immediately.
  • The State Department’s absurd attempt to shift blame to the CIA for security shortfalls in Benghazi.  According to the six Republicans, the State Department objected to language in a draft of the committee report concerning security at the Benghazi consulate by claiming that since the same number of people died at the CIA Annex, the CIA should be held equally responsible for its lack of security at the Annex.  The Republican additional views found this argument to be absurd, noting that “there is a tremendous difference between a fortified facility [the CIA Annex] that suffers a fatal blow from a mortar attack and a porous compound that yields to a basic ground assault.”  The six Republicans noted that the two men killed at the CIA Annex (Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty) were killed on the roof after being attacked by mortars and that there likely would have been more American casualties if it were not for the successful rescue efforts by the CIA Annex personnel. 
Senator Collins’ additional views are milder than her Republican colleagues but are still very critical of the Obama Administration.  She faults the committee’s report for not placing enough emphasis on “(1) the Administration’s initial misleading of the American people about the terrorist nature of the attack; (2) the failure of the Administration to hold anyone at the State Department, especially Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy, fully responsible for the security lapses; and (3) the unfulfilled promises of President Obama that he would bring the terrorists to justice.”
 
Predictably, the news media has facilitated efforts by the Obama Administration and Senate Democrats to portray the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Benghazi attacks as the end of this story and a rebuke to Republicans who have alleged a cover-up about the Benghazi tragedy in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election.  Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein has said she hopes this report will put “conspiracy theories” to rest.  Democratic consultant Brent Budowsky joined this fight last month by calling Republican demands for investigations of Benghazi “the GOP Benghazi Disease” in an article in The Hill.  David Ignatius, a notorious apologist for the Obama administration who writes for theWashington Post, said in response to the Senate report that Congressional Republicans wasted a year arguing about “phony issues” and termed GOP interest in this issue an “obsession” and a “jihad.”
 
The Republican additional views to the Senate Intelligence report and the new majority staff report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee prove that there is still a lot to be investigated about the Benghazi attacks.  The news media and Democratic politicians are already stepping up their efforts to portray Republicans trying to pursue this issue as kooks.  Republican congressmen and future presidential candidates should not deterred by this pressure.  The Obama Administration’s cover-up of the Benghazi attacks to ensure Mr Obama would win the 2012 presidential election is a serious affront to our democratic system that it only got away with because the mainstream media refused to do its job.  Hillary Clinton was obviously an active, if not a central, figure in this cover-up.  The integrity of our system of government requires a full and honest accounting of this tragedy and making sure the American people fully weigh Mrs Clinton’s role if she runs for president in 2016.  The additional views by the six Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans provide an excellent blueprint on how to do this.

The Future of Conservative Internationalism

With Henry Nau, Rowan Scarborough, Diana West, Bill Gertz.

HENRY NAU discusses how the themes of his new book, “Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy Under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan,” relate to the modern era. He argues that Western nations should make priorities for which countries they should focus on promoting freedom within.

ROWAN SCARBOROUGH, of the Washington Times, delves deeper into his article about the Pentagon’s preoccupation with social issues in the military.

DIANA WEST, author of “American Betrayal,” talks about the difficulties that arise when the US and its allies try to conduct affairs in a “Western” way in the Islamic world.

BILL GERTZ, of the Washington Free Beacon, offers his thoughts on a recent New York Times article that claimed Al-Qaeda was not responsible for the deadly 9/11/12 attack in Benghazi.

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‘The New York Times’ destroys Obama

The New York Times just delivered a mortal blow to the Obama administration and its Middle East policy.

Call it fratricide. It was clearly unintentional.

Indeed, is far from clear that the paper realizes what it has done.

Last Saturday the Times published an 8,000-word account by David Kirkpatrick detailing the terrorist strike against the US Consulate and the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. In it, Kirkpatrick tore to shreds the foundations of President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism strategy and his overall policy in the Middle East.

Obama first enunciated those foundations in his June 4, 2009, speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University. Ever since, they have been the rationale behind US counterterror strategy and US Middle East policy.

Obama’s first assertion is that radical Islam is not inherently hostile to the US. As a consequence, America can appease radical Islamists. Moreover, once radical Muslims are appeased, they will become US allies, (replacing the allies the US abandons to appease the radical Muslims).

Obama’s second strategic guidepost is his claim that the only Islamic group that is a bona fide terrorist organization is the faction of al-Qaida directly subordinate to Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Only this group cannot be appeased and must be destroyed through force.

The administration has dubbed the Zawahiri faction of al-Qaida “core al-Qaida.” And anyone who operates in the name of al-Qaida, or any other group that does not have courtroom-certified operational links to Zawahiri, is not really al-Qaida, and therefore, not really a terrorist group or a US enemy.

These foundations have led the US to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan. They are the rationale for the US’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide. They are the basis for Obama’s allegiance to Turkey’s Islamist government, and his early support for the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.

They are the basis for the administration’s kneejerk support for the PLO against Israel.

Obama’s insistent bid to appease Iran, and so enable the mullocracy to complete its nuclear weapons program. is similarly a product of his strategic assumptions. So, too, the US’s current diplomatic engagement of Hezbollah in Lebanon owes to the administration’s conviction that any terror group not directly connected to Zawahiri is a potential US ally.

From the outset of the 2011 revolt against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, it was clear that a significant part of the opposition was composed of jihadists aligned if not affiliated with al-Qaida. Benghazi was specifically identified by documents seized by US forces in Iraq as a hotbed of al-Qaida recruitment.

Obama and his advisers dismissed and ignored the evidence. The core of al-Qaida, they claimed, was not involved in the anti-Gaddafi revolt. And to the extent jihadists were fighting Gaddafi, they were doing so as allies of the US.

In other words, the two core foundations of Obama’s understanding of terrorism and of the Muslim world were central to US support for the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.

With Kirkpatrick’s report, the Times exposed the utter falsity of both.

Kirkpatrick showed the mindset of the US-supported rebels and through it, the ridiculousness of the administration’s belief that you can’t be a terrorist if you aren’t directly subordinate to Zawahiri.

One US-supported Islamist militia commander recalled to him that at the outset of the anti-Gaddafi rebellion, “Teenagers came running around… [asking] ‘Sheikh, sheikh, did you know al-Qaida? Did you know Osama bin Laden? How do we fight?” In the days and weeks following the September 11, 2012, attack on the US installations in Benghazi in which US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and four other Americans were killed, the administration claimed that the attacks were not carried out by terrorists. Rather they were the unfortunate consequence of a spontaneous protest by otherwise innocent Libyans.

According to the administration’s version of events, these guileless, otherwise friendly demonstrators, who killed the US ambassador and four other Americans, were simply angered by a You- Tube video of a movie trailer which jihadist clerics in Egypt had proclaimed was blasphemous.

In an attempt to appease the mob after the fact, Obama and then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton were filmed in commercials run on Pakistani television apologizing for the video and siding with the mob against the movie-maker, who is the only person the US has imprisoned following the attack. Then-ambassador to the UN and current National Security Adviser Susan Rice gave multiple television interviews placing the blame for the attacks on the video.

According to Kirkpatrick’s account of the assault against the US installations in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, the administration’s description of the assaults was a fabrication. Far from spontaneous political protests spurred by rage at a YouTube video, the attack was premeditated. US officials spotted Libyans conducting surveillance of the consulate nearly 15 hours before the attack began.

Libyan militia warned US officials “of rising threats against Americans from extremists in Benghazi,” two days before the attack.

From his account, the initial attack – in which the consulate was first stormed – was carried out not by a mob, but by a few dozen fighters. They were armed with assault rifles. They acted in a coordinated, professional manner with apparent awareness of US security procedures.

During the initial assault, the attackers shot down the lights around the compound, stormed the gates, and swarmed around the security personnel who ran to get their weapons, making it impossible for them to defend the ambassador and other personnel trapped inside.

According to Kirkpatrick, after the initial attack, the organizers spurred popular rage and incited a mob assault on the consulate by spreading the rumor that the Americans had killed a local. Others members of the secondary mob, Kirkpatrick claimed, were motivated by reports of the video.

This mob assault, which followed the initial attack and apparent takeover of the consulate, was part of the predetermined plan. The organizers wanted to produce chaos. As Kirkpatrick explained, “The attackers had posted sentries at Venezia Road, adjacent to the [consulate] compound, to guard their rear flank, but they let pass anyone trying to join the mayhem.”

According to Kirkpatrick, the attack was perpetrated by local terrorist groups that were part of the US-backed anti-Gaddafi coalition. The people who were conducting the surveillance of the consulate 15 hours before the attack were uniformed security forces who escaped in an official car.

Members of the militia tasked with defending the compound participated in the attack.

Ambassador Stevens, who had served as the administration’s emissary to the rebels during the insurrection against Gaddafi, knew personally many of the terrorists who orchestrated the attack.

And until the very end, he was taken in by the administration’s core belief that it was possible to appease al-Qaida-sympathizing Islamic jihadists who were not directly affiliated with Zawahiri.

As Kirkpatrick noted, Stevens “helped shape the Obama administration’s conviction that it could work with the rebels, even those previously hostile to the West, to build a friendly, democratic government.”

The entire US view that local militias, regardless of their anti-American, jihadist ideologies, could become US allies was predicated not merely on the belief that they could be appeased, but that they weren’t terrorists because they weren’t al-Qaida proper.

As Kirkpatrick notes, “American intelligence efforts in Libya concentrated on the agendas of the biggest militia leaders and the handful of Libyans with suspected ties to al-Qaida. The fixation on al-Qaida might have distracted experts from more imminent threats.”

But again, the only reason that the intelligence failed to notice the threats emanating from local US-supported terrorists is because the US counterterrorist strategy, like its overall Middle East strategy, is to seek to appease all US enemies other than the parts of al-Qaida directly commanded by Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Distressingly, most of the discussion spurred by Kirkpatrick’s article has ignored the devastating blow he visited on the intellectual foundations of Obama’s foreign policy. Instead, the discussion has focused on his claim that there is “no evidence that al-Qaida or other international terrorist group had any role in the assault,” and on his assertion that the YouTube video did spur to action some of the participants in the assault.

Kirkpatrick’s claim that al-Qaida played no role in the attack was refuted by the Times’ own reporting six weeks after the attack. It has also been refuted by congressional and State Department investigations, by the UN and by a raft of other reporting.

His claim that the YouTube video did spur some of the attackers to action was categorically rejected last spring in sworn congressional testimony by then-deputy chief of the US mission to Libya Gregory Hicks.

Last May Hicks stated, “The YouTube video was a non-event in Libya. The video was not instigative of anything that was going on in Libya. We saw no demonstrators related to the video anywhere in Libya.”

Kirkpatrick’s larger message – that the reasoning behind Obama’s entire counterterrorist strategy and his overall Middle East policy is totally wrong, and deeply destructive – has been missed because his article was written and published to whitewash the administration’s deliberate mischaracterization of the events in Benghazi, not to discredit the rationale behind its Middle East policy and counterterrorism strategy. This is why he claimed that al-Qaida wasn’t involved in the attack. And this is why he claimed that the YouTube video was a cause for the attack.

This much was made clear in a blog post by editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, who alleged that the entire discourse on Benghazi is promoted by the Republicans to harm the Democrats, and Kirkpatrick’s story served to weaken the Republican arguments. In Rosenthal’s words, “The Republicans hope to tarnish Democratic candidates by making it seem as though Mr. Obama doesn’t take al-Qaida seriously.”

So pathetically, in a bid to defend Obama and Clinton and the rest of the Democrats, the Times published a report that showed that Obama’s laser-like focus on the Zawahiri-controlled faction of al-Qaida has endangered the US.

By failing to view as enemies any other terror groups – even if they have participated in attacks against the US – and indeed, in perceiving them as potential allies, Obama has failed to defend against them. Indeed, by wooing them as future allies, Obama has empowered forces as committed as al-Qaida to defeating the US.

Again, it is not at all apparent that the Times realized what it was doing. But from Israel to Egypt, to Iran to Libya to Lebanon, it is absolutely clear that Obama and his colleagues continue to implement the same dangerous, destructive agenda that defeated the US in Benghazi and will continue to cause US defeat after US defeat.