Just read Cliff Kincaid's excellent Nov. 8 analysis of the election in which he highlights Karl Rove's leading role in shaping the Romney campaign strategy not to define Barack Obama as the radical that he is: the Communist-mentored, Frantz Fanon inspired, faculty-lounge-Marxist who began his political career as a "fusion" candidate, running on both the socialist New Party and Democrat ticket.

As Rove saw it, the GOP couldn't say anything bad about Obama or it would turn voters off. Romney, alas, apparently agreed. (My rundown of what happened and why, here and here.)

Kincaid cites exclusive Bloomberg Businessweek coverage of a closed event at the tail-end of the GOP convention in Tampa where Rove addressed 70 top GOP donors. There, he laid out his strategy to win over crucial swing voters to defeat Barack Obama: as the reporter put it, "to criticize Barack Obama without really criticizing him."

Here is what Rove said, via Bloomberg:

What had emerged from that...

Read More »

The LA Times reports:

On the morning of April 27 last year, Afghan Air Force Col. Ahmed Gul walked into a control room on the Afghan military side of the Kabul international airport. He was armed with a Smith & Wesson pistol provided by the United States military.

Within minutes, eight U.S. Air Force advisors and an American contractor were shot dead. The advisors were executed with bullets to the head. The nine killings remain the single deadliest incident among insider attacks that have targeted U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

A couple of previous posts here and here.

An Air Force investigation concluded that Gul, who had been radicalized by Islamist extremists, acted alone. ...

My take on the Air Force investigation here. Also, here is a report worth revisiting on the anti-infidel invective of Kabul mosques (Ahmed Gul attended one such mosque), which I now notice includes the revelation that in February 2011, two months before Gul's rampage,...

Read More »

Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) at WND.com dispels the notion that a soul-selling, GOP amnesty push would lead to Hispanic-driven GOP victories. Not only is such a strategy numerically a non-starter, it is also a political non-starter. Hispanics are registering as Democrats not because the GOP, at least theoretically, is identified with border control and immigration control, but because they identify with the Democrat Party. Think about it. If the one issue of amnesty drove Hispanics, they would have voted, for example, not only for John "Shamnesty" McCain in 2008, they would have voted for the party of Reagan in the 1988 election, two years after the historic amnesty legislation supported by Ronald Reagan passed. That 1986 act, of course, disastrously served as a magnet to draw millions more mainly Spanish-speaking illegal aliens to this country and "into the shadows" where they have been awaiting the "next"...

Read More »

...

Read More »

Below is a CNN transcript of Rep. Peter King's appearance before the press after David Petraeus appeared  before the House Intelligence Committee on November 16. King is clearly struggling with what he has heard from Petraeus: a version of Petraeus' September 14 briefing at odds with what King and, more important, the record as set at the time by the ranking Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger, recall. In a nutshell, on September 14, Petraeus emphasized a "spontaneous," video-driven protest that became violent as "extreme" groups opportunistically attacked the US compound (with RPGs and mortars). Petraeus spun this false narrative to the intell committee at a time when the US government already knew no protest whatsoever had taken place in Benghazi; rather, that the ambassador and three other Americans had been killed in a planned assault by al-Qaeda linked groups on the anniversary of 9/11. Petraeus' testimony, in other words, was a lie and an outrage -- but no one seems to care. Meanwhile, it is a crime...

Read More »

This is a photograph of Anne Casper, the new US Consul General in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In the photograph, she is beaming about the 25,000th visa presented in Saudi Arabia in 2012 on October 21 (93.7 percent of Saudi visa applicants have been approved this year, according to the article in Prince Alwaleed's Arab News). The lucky visa-holder is a "Saudi businessman" heading for the US for meetings about a company which is described as  promoting "studying engineering sciences through after-school programs for young people."

How great is that?

One day earlier, Casper had been "received" by the OIC's SecGen Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, which is OIC-ese for "met with." Caspar and Ihsanoglu, the OIC declared, had a "useful and extensive exchange of views on issues of mutual interest" (read: Islamic interest), which, in this case, you can bet, was an exchange about outlawing defamation of Islam, or, as...

Read More »

As CIA Director, David Petraeus testified before the House Intel Committee in a closed hearing on Benghazi  on September 14.

(Mistake #1: These hearings should have been open.)

A recap from a post of October 20 titled "What Did the CIA Know and When Did It Stop Knowing It":

On September 14, ABC established that a bifurcated narrative was emerging from different wings of the administration. On the one hand, CIA Director David Petraeus was putting out the (non-existent) protest story; on the other hand, the Pentagon was already talking terrorist attack.

(Worth tucking away as background from an earlier Ignatius column is that the CIA Director "is also said to have pushed hard in Libya, rushing case officers there to work with the opposition" -- a.k.a. al Qaeda.)

ABC reported:

The attack that killed four Americans in the Libyan consulate began as a spontaneous protest against the film “The Innocence of Muslims,” but Islamic militants who may have...

Read More »

This week's syndicated column:

Was David Petraeus as great a general as the write-ups of his downfall routinely claim? This is a provocative question that I will begin to answer with another question: Did America prevail in the Iraq War? I suspect few would say "yes" and believe it, which is no reflection on the valor and sacrifice of the American and allied troops who fought there. On the contrary, it was the vaunted strategy of the two-step Petraeus "surge" that was the blueprint of failure.

While U.S. troops carried out Part One successfully by fighting to establish basic security, the "trust" and "political reconciliation" that such security was supposed to trigger within Iraqi society never materialized in Part Two. Meanwhile, the "Sunni awakening" lasted only as long as the U.S. payroll...

Read More »

On Tuesday, November 13 at Hillsdale College in Washington, DC, the Center for Security Policy presented a live-streamed panel discussion on the shariah doctrinal threat to national security. Dr. Andrew Bostom, Diana West and Stephen Coughlin were joined by Frank Gaffney to discuss "Benghazi: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Influence of Shariah Doctrine."

Another reason not to be nostalgic

Time magazine:

“Petraeus is a remarkable piece of fiction created and promoted by neocons in government, the media and academia,” argues Douglas Macgregor, a retired and outspoken Army colonel and innovator, known for Breaking the Phalanx, his book taking the Army to task for the way it organizes and uses its ground forces.

Macgregor elaborates:

“How does an officer with no personal experience of direct fire combat in Panama or Desert Storm become a division CDR in 2003, man who for 35 years shamelessly reinforced whatever dumb idea his superior advanced regardless of its impact on soldiers, let alone the nation, a man who served repeatedly as a sycophantic aide-de-camp, military assistant and executive officer to four stars get so far? How does the same man who balked at closing with and destroying the enemy in 2003 in front of Baghdad agree to sacrifice more than...

Read More »

In 59 voting divisions of Philadelphia, Mitt Romney lost 59,605 to zero. As IBD notes, Romney was

similarly blanked in nine precincts in nationally pivotal and heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County, Ohio, centered on Cleveland, where he did even worse than third-party candidates.

Seem impossible? Yes, it does. And that's not just our opinion. Rich Exner, the Cleveland Plain Dealer's data analysis editor, said he doesn't find the shutout credible.

Equally as implausible were the turnouts in Democratic strongholds that either exceeded the number of registered voters or the voting-age population.

What to do? At least Allen West (R-FL), for one, is fighting back, demanding a recount...

Read More »

Saudi Arabia's Turki al Faisal addressing Bill Clinton at Clinton Global Initiative shindig, September 25, 2012:

"Muslims will never forget your deliverance of Bosnia-Herzogovenia and Kosovo, and near-deliverance, within 100 meters, of Palestine from occupation."

Uncle Sam Wants Him: Libya Shield spokesman Hafez al-Aquri and the grand old al Qaeda flag

--

From the Washington Post, November 10:

Last week, a U.S. Embassy delegation, led by CIA operatives, traveled to Benghazi to meet and recruit fighters directly from the Libyan Shield, a powerful umbrella organization of militias, according to Fathi al-Obeidi, a commander of the group.

The Libyan Shield provided the rescue force that assisted the U.S mission in Benghazi on the night of the attack, and Obeidi said his fighters represent the most viable local option for a special unit.

Wonder how that Libya Shield "assistance" worked out? All I seem to read about it is that the US rescue force was held up at the airport in Benghazi for hours awaiting permissions or papers or red tape or until everyone was dead or whatever. It seems that after the ragtag US team...

Read More »

They say Romney is shell-shocked; well, so am I.

As what passes for post-election conventional wisdom crescendoes in choruses of "Republicans can win again if they become Democrats," some counter-conventional wisdom lies deep in the exit polls. Bottom line: Don't accept the isolating, poisonous, drip-drip demonization of white men. Yes, they voted for Romney 62 to 35 percent (for which the Left is cranking up re-education camps to put them through intensive rigors of shaming and peer pressure until they are fit to join brave new Obamaworld), but polling tells us they are not alone.

The first and most seismic poll result blows up the GOP's so-called "gender gap." Yes, a majority of women voted for Obama (55 to 44 percent), and a majority of men voted for Romney (52 to 45 percent). However, a majority of white women voted for Romney, too. Fifty-six percent of white women voted for Romney; 42 percent voted for Obama. End of gender gap. We're back to a racial divide.

I first...

Read More »

Read and weep, America

---

This week's syndicated column:

If Election Day is about picking winners, the morning after is for post-mortems. That’s when we slice open the losing campaigns, set aside the hundreds of millions of dollars that gush out and pick apart the cause of death.

Why did the Romney campaign fail? Maybe the country is now GOP-proof. That is, maybe a Constitution-guided, free-market, limited-government candidate no longer can “appeal” to the majority of the electorate. It could be that the death knell rang early this year once 67.3 million of us, or one in five Americans, had come to depend on federal assistance, formerly known as “the dole.”

This nearly takes us back to the level we hit in 1994 (23.1 percent), before President Bill Clinton and the GOP-led Congress “ended” welfare as we...

Read More »

Via Newsbusters.

Everybody tried to pin them down? Who's Everybody?

For shame.

Stanley Kurtz provides a likely summation of what is in store in Obama's second term.

What would that be? Obama's first term.

Kurtz explains:

That’s because the president’s first term hasn’t really happened yet, at least not in the conventional sense. Ordinarily, a president enacts various policies in his first term, the public test-drives the changes, and the president’s reelection campaign is a referendum on those new policies. The difference in Obama’s case is that in order to secure reelection, he has backloaded nearly all of his most transformative and controversial changes into a second term. Obama’s next term will actually put into effect health-care reform, Dodd-Frank, and a host of other highly controversial policies that are already surging through the pipeline yet still barely known to the public.

...

Read More »

On September 17, Reuters ran a story headlined: "Intel agencies warned U.S. Embassy in Egypt of possible violence."

That's nice. So why didn't "intel agencies" warn the US Embassy in Libya of possible violence, too? Presumably because the "intel agences" -- Petraeus' CIA, no doubt -- were focused on a "video threat" in Egypt, not in Libya, and on September 10 they cabled the embassy in Egypt accordingly. Egypt was indeed jump-starting another Islamic rage cycle from a Youtube video clip, "Innocence of Muslims," whose producer, incredibly, remains in jail on "parole violations." But, conveniently forgotten amid the many administration statements that there was no forwarning of an attack in Libya, AQ leader Ayman al-Zawaheri uploaded a video of his own on September 9 and 10 calling for Libyans to attack the US to avenge the US killing of a senior AQ leader from Libya, Yahya al-Libi. This video apparently went ignored by these same "intel agencies."

Why did a clip from a Mohammed movie...

Read More »

Herschel Smith at The Captain's Journal isn't buying the Pentagon's just-baked tale that there simply were no assets available to support beleaguered Americans in Benghazi. On considering a recent post by Paul Wolfowitz advancing this same claim (interesting how Wolfowitz and Condoleeza Rice have been vocal in supporting O narrative), Smith writes:

According to this claim, the Africa command (based in Europe) had no assets to which it could turn.  None.  Contrary to reports (that I have cited), there were no Delta operators at Sigonella.  There was no AC-130, there wasn’t even Marine Force Recon, again, contrary to published reports that I have cited.

They were apparently all in the field, deployed across Africa.  No one was available.  There were no air assets available to assist the poor souls at Benghazi.  Not even an MP or cook could have responded...

Read More »

First, the WSJ, now the NYT: CIA Director David Petraeus is feeling a little heat from the spotlight regarding Benghazi. It's an extremely soft-focus spot, however, one that obscures the most important question regarding Petraeus' role in Obama administration mendacity in characterizing what was a planned terrorist attack as a violent melee growing from a "spontaneous" protest over a Youtube video. That most important question is, Why, three days after this terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, did Petraeus go before the House Intelligence Committee and brief lawmakers that a Youtube video was to blame for a "spontaneous" protest -- wholly fictitious -- that "went on," as ranking Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger told ABC on September 14 following the Petraeus briefing, "for two to three hours"?

Ruppersberger:

“In the Benghazi area, in the beginning we feel that it was spontaneous – the protest- because it went on for two or three hours, which is very relevant...

Read More »

This week's syndicated column:

As we arrive at Election Day, some of the most crucial questions left unanswered about Benghazi are, in fact, the simplest. They are not “fog of war” questions. They are not questions rendered unanswerable by “conflicting intelligence.” They are questions that probe clear actions taking place not on the roof of a safe house under mortar fire, but inside the fortress-like, orderly and well-lit White House.

Who turned down requests for military relief for Americans under rocket and mortar fire? Who decided to suppress the fact that no protest preceded this attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that claimed four American lives? Who ordered senior Obama administration officials to lie to the American people for two weeks by blaming a YouTube video for a “spontaneous” outbreak of violence that was, in fact, a coordinated terrorist assault?

President Obama declared he made his priorities about Benghazi clear “the minute I found out what was happening.”...

Read More »

My latest report for:



Washington, DC -- Two weeks ago, I reported here that the Obama administration had dug itself into a minefield of lies about the Benghazi terrorist attack that the president would have to cross to get to Election Day. Whether he will do so unscathed remains unclear, but if Barack Obama is re-elected president on November 6, it will be for one reason only. It will be because the US media threw themselves on every Benghazi bombshell that threatened the president, shutting down democracy in the process.

Not all of the media, of course. Fox News, WND.com, Daily Beast, Reuters, CNN, CBS and others have reported most of the key facts now available. These include, first, the revelation that intelligence immediately indicated the US consulate in Benghazi was destroyed in a planned terrorist attack, not as the result of a “spontaneous” protest triggered by a Youtube video. The latter scenario, however, is the demonstrable lie the Obama administration, including President Obama, repeatedly told for weeks. Later, the State Department established the fact that no “protest” at all occurred before the attack. The Obama administration explanation for these and other discrepancies? “Bad intelligence” or “fog of war.” The major media largely agree, no questions asked. Literally.

...

Read More »

Greta Susteren interviewed Cathering Herridge on Fox last night about a smoking cable:

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: Disturbing new information about Benghazi and the Obama administration. Fox News obtained a classified cable sent in August from the U.S. mission in Benghazi to the State Department in Washington. The cable, coming just weeks before the attack, warned the Benghazi consulate could not sustain a coordinated attack.

But that is not all that was in that cable. Fox News chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, who has read that cable, is here with the latest -- Catherine.

CATHERINE HERRIDGE, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Well, the status of the cable is that I really believe, having read it, that it is the smoking gun warning here. You've got this emergency meeting in Benghazi less than a month before the attack. At that briefing, the people are told that there are 10 -- 10 -- Islamist militias and al Qaeda groups in Benghazi.

The consulate cannot...

Read More »

"Facebook" didn't like this political message posted on Saturday by the Special Operations Speaks PAC (SOS) so "Facebook" took it down. So reports Breitbart today. After Larry Ward discovered his photo-message was removed from the page and replaced with a notice stating that it violated "Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities," he reposted it. Then "Facebook" pulled it down again and suspended Ward's account for 24 hours.

Faceless totalitarianism.

Update: The page and the pic are back up.

Newsmax reports:

Pictures of the sentinels at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, D.C., standing guard during an early rain band from Hurricane Sandy went viral online Monday — including one that was taken weeks before the storm. The 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment will continue its mission to guard the tomb throughout the storm in the same manner it does every day, as well as completing its other duties, regardless of how bad conditions get, according to its Facebook page. The regiment, known as The Old Guard, has maintained a 24-hour-a-day presence at the tomb since 1948. This is part of its mission as the U.S. Army’s official honor guard, which includes providing military ceremonies in Washington and as funeral escorts at Arlington National Cemetary. The picture of three tomb sentinels was first posted by the First Army Division East this morning and was shared more than 53,000 times, and picked up by dozens...

Read More »

In the last installment, I examined cables written by Christopher Stevens in 2008 (and available courtesy Wikileaks) that seem to capture a significant trend in his thinking, and, perhaps the thinking of others in the US government, which may have helped drive the evolution of the disastrous US "Arab Spring" policy that put Uncle Sam in alliance with al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and other groups driving the spread of sharia (Islamic law).

This trend appears as Stevens learned how to explain -- how to rationalize, really -- the jihad corridor that eastern Libyans in particular followed to fight Americans in Iraq. While the Washington Post today quite narrowly (ignorantly) tells readers that Derna sent more jihadists to Iraq "during the U.S. occupation [sic] than any other place in Libya," the larger truth is that eastern Libya, led by Derna and Benghazi, sent more jihadists to kill and maim Americans -- whose Iraq "occupation," by the way, included fighting AQ, preventing Sunni-Shiite civil war and "nation-building" all at the same time -- per capita than any place in the world. And, as discussed in Part 2, the citizenry is extremely proud of this ultimate anti-American fact.

...

Read More »

Frank Gaffney neatly recaps a slew of breaking reports by Catherine Herridge, Aaron Klein and Clare Lopez concerning what might have drawn the late Amb. Christopher Stevens to Benghazi on September 10 and 11. The diferent strands of this developing story indicate that Stevens may have been there to oversee or inspect an ongoing covert CIA operation to supply weapons and men to the jihadist-dominated "rebels" fighting Syria's Assad. Stevens' last meeting, after all, was with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin. Turkey, of course, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, is a leading supporter...

Read More »

The flag of Ansar al-Sharia, which reportedly led the Benghazi attack; and the flag of Libya Shield, which reportedly provided security to US Marines in Benghazi.

---

This Week's Syndicated Column:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column addressing the national scandal that investigation into the security failures and lies surrounding Benghazi-gate must also expose. This even larger scandal concerns the fact that throughout the revolutionary cycle known as Arab Spring, the Obama administration threw in Uncle Sam’s lot with the bad guys – the “rebels,” the “martyrs,” the Muslim Brothers, the whole jihad-happy and Shariah-ruling crew in Libya and the wider Middle East. In so doing, Uncle Sam,...

Read More »

White House Press Gaggle, October 24, 2012

---

Yesterday, Reuters, Fox, CNN, CBS and other media reported that on 9/11/12 emails went to top Obama administration officials alerting them that the Benghazi consulate was under terrorist attack. The first arrived at 4:05 pm ET on 9/11/12 -- 10:05 pm Benghazi time, about 25 minutes into the attack. At 6:07 pm ET, another email reported that Ansar Al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for the attack.

At some point after that, the White House cook-up-a-protest-that-didn't-happen and blame-the-video lie began.

Yesterday, also, White House spokesman Jay Carney -- he who repeatedly perepetrated the above lie in the weeks after the terrorist attack in Benghazi -- went before the press, the Fourth Estate, our eyes and ears. The skeptics. The questioners of authority.

And?

The Benghazi emails didnt come up until Question #8.

For scene-setting purposes, it's worth nothing Question #7 was: "Based on some of those stats...

Read More »

Charles Woods, father of fallen ex-SEAL Tyrone Woods, called in to the Lars Larsen radio show yesterday to express his thoughts about the news that Benghazi was known to be a terrorist attack right away, was observed via Drone cameras in real time, and that relief forces remained undeployed from nearby countries.

Tyrone and ex-SEAL Glen Doherty were both killed by a mortar fired at the safe house annex late in the firefight, after Wissam bin Hamid's Libya Shield Brigade had escorted eight Marines from Tripoli to the safe house.

Charles Woods says: "Someone had to say `don't go rescue them.' We need to find out who gave that order and why."

Woods says he's not angry at anybody but believes "something doesn't smell right." He recounted...

Read More »

About that Libya Shield Brigade which 1) fought under the black flag of al Qaeda during the February 17 Revolution, and 2) escorted the eight US Marines who arrived from Tripoli to aid the Benghazi consulate under attack on the night of 9/11/12.

Two Libya Shield Brigade leaders met with US diplomat(s) on September 9, according to a US embassy cable drafted by David C. McFarland, signed by Christopher Stevens and dispatched on September 11. (It was posted online by the House Oversight Committee.) This cable was first discussed in the Daily Beast on October 8 in a story recounting the fact that generic militia leaders had threatened to pull security from US interests in Benghazi, but it contains some interesting details not previously noted.

Here is the cable's Item 4 in toto:

Militia commanders discuss Muslim...

Read More »

Bouchra Ismaili, Dutch Labor Party member of Rotterdam City Council: "Listen up, crazy freaks, we're here to stay. You're the foreigners here, with Allah on my side I'm not afraid of anything. Take my advice: convert to Islam, and you will find peace."

---

Via IsraelNationalNews.com, a report by Giulio Meotti from the end of the world:

The Middle East is full of churches turned into Islamic sites, like the Umayyad in Damascus, the Ibn Tulun in Cairo and the cathedral of St. Sophia in Instanbul.

In Hevron and on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, the Muslims built their sites on the Jewish ones.

A sad prophecy of the writer Emile Cioran once cast a sinister prophecy on Europe: “The French will not wake up until Notre Dame becomes a mosque”.

This...

Read More »

From The Des Moines Register staff blog comes a journalistic milestone: Obama makes the case for the paper's endorsement off the record, and the paper is perplexed. "No reason was given for the unusual condition of keeping it private," they write. "We relented and took the call. How could we not? It’s the leader of the free world on line one."

Probably going off again about transparency again.

The Des Moines Register’s publisher and I spoke with President Barack Obama this morning — but we can’t tell you what he said.

Just four days before the Register’s presidential endorsement is released, Laura Hollingsworth and I received a phone call from the president. He was calling from Florida, on the heels of a morning campaign appearance and about 14 hours after his debate with GOP nominee Mitt Romney at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla.

The conference call lasted nearly 30 minutes and was an incredibly informative exchange of questions, answers and an insightful glimpse into the...

Read More »

Arrested: Kevin Carroll. Paul Weston and Tommy Robinson

---

Totalitarian UK Watch:

Gates of Vienna has pulled together what is known about a government crackdown on British Freedom and the English Defense League, two parties that refuse to go quietly into the Islamic night over Britain.

Baron Bodissey writes:

I first learned of the arrest of Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll early yesterday morning — after most Americans were in bed, and before most Brits were awake. I held off posting anything (other than a single sketchy MSM report) until I had more information.

And now Paul Weston has also been arrested — events are overtaking us thick and fast.

Before I get into the details (such as I have), let’s take a look at the broad picture: this was obviously a carefully-planned takedown of the English Defence League.

The Powers That Be in the UK have apparently determined that the EDL is weak at the moment. They calculated that a precisely-targeted...

Read More »

October 19, 2012: The CIA concludes "Innocence of Muslims" did not cause the terrorist assault in Benghazi

---

The Daily Beast's Eli Lake reports on a "suspect" in the Benghazi assault but his B-matter is more interesting.

He writes:

The CIA’s latest assessment also says once and for all that the assault didn’t start as a protest against an anti-Islam Internet video. In the first eight days following the attacks, Obama administration cited that video as the primary cause of the assault.

The CIA presented its "latest assessment" to Congress on Friday, October 19. Once and for all, there was no video-inspired protest that spiralled into a terrrist attack in Benghazi, the multi-billion-dollar intelligence-gathering institution finally said 38 days after the attack.

Lake continues:

Yet the FBI knew there was no protest as early as Sept. 14,...

Read More »

As the Benghazi storyline clears to a point where CIA Director Petraeus' personal testimony is absolutely required to establish how the White House came to perpetuate a lie for at least two weeks -- namely, that a "spontaneous" but, we now  know, non-existent protest combusted into a terrorist attack on the consulate -- diversionary tactics become inevitable. Media static ensues. One likely entry in that category was Saturday's WaPo column by David Ignatius, discussed here, in which an intelligence trial balloon went up to the effect that while there wasn't a live protest in Benghazi, the terrorists watched the Cairo protest live on TV, which is practically the same thing. (Hard to imagine such nonsense flying but you never know.)

Today, Commentary's Max Boot  seems to enter this same realm of Petraeus damage control with a blog entry clarifying, postscript-style, an earlier post pointing out that reading news reports on Benghazi probably yielded more accurate information than reading classified...

Read More »

Yesterday, we learned specifically that the CIA station chief in Tripoli reported to Washington within 24 hours that the consulate attack was executed by terrorists and was not a spontaneous demonstration over a video that turned violent. The  President, of course, would continue to weave a narrative blaming the video for two more weeks, hitting that narrative's climax in his UN address on September 25. Citing the video six times in his address, Obama declared: "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." It seems clear that the video, not the jihad, simply had to be driver in all of the 9/11/12 Islamic rampaging or else Obama's big pitch for the Islamic anti-"blasphemy" movement wouldn't have been, even in his world, feasible.

...

Read More »

An essay by George W. Ford:

Is CBS News coordinating a one-two punch with the Obama campaign in Monday's third debate? This is a question worth asking as it is certainly possible that CNN coordinated with the campaign in the second debate, and failed to inform beforehand the Romney campaign and the public they were doing so. Did Candy Crowley simply intervene on the president’s behalf during the exchange on Libya? Or was she, prior to the debate, ordered or prodded by the campaign to do so? In other words, did she act merely as a biased journalist/moderator, or did she know ahead of time that her help would be needed by Obama to maintain the fiction that the US government did not place the blame for Benghazi on an American film maker? When Obama said, “Get the transcript,” it is obvious that the order was directed at Crowley, and that the words meant she must either pick up and read from a piece of paper he had reason to believe was lying on the moderator’s desk, or at least acknowledge...

Read More »

Part 1 is here.

---

To attempt to understand Christopher Stevens' long-standing interest in ben Qumu, the al Qaeda terrorist suspected of leading the Benghazi attack on September 11, 2012 in which Stevens and three other Americans were murdered, we must seek context in more of Stevens' cables. (Thanks be to Wikileaks.)

On February 15, 2008, Stevens wrote a lengthy cable titled EXTREMISM IN EASTERN LIBYA. On one level it confirms that Stevens was NOT some liberal naif when he docked in Benghazi in April 2011 to serve as point man to the so-called "rebels"-- that cutesy bluff of a name which disguises a movement better described by Clare M. Lopez as "individuals and groups that were, at a minimum, allied ideologically with Al Qaeda." No real stretch to simplify and call Stevens the Obama administration's point man to al Qaeda.

This early 2008 cable recounts the analysis of a US-Libyan dual national who regularly visited eastern Libya concerning...

Read More »

This week's syndicated column:

Honestly, did the buck really stop with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Benghazi-gate, or did the buck just stop?

Here’s what Clinton said: “I take responsibility. I’m in charge of the State Department’s 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts. The president and the vice president wouldn’t be knowledgeable about specific decisions that are made by security professionals. They’re the ones who weigh all of the threats and the risks and the needs and make a considered decision.”

Stop. Clinton’s taken responsibility, she’s in charge – and then she declares that “security professionals” make the decisions? Not only is this a non sequitur, it’s nonsense. One thing Americans learned from recent House hearings about the Sept. 11 orchestrated terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya – which killed four Americans and which President Barack Obama insisted for two weeks was sparked by a YouTube video – is that the security professional in question, Eric Nordstrom, asked Clinton’s State Department for more security and was denied.

...

Read More »

---

In analyzing the Benghazi scandal, it is crucial to highlight not only the dangers of relying on jihadist armed gangs for American security in Benghazi, but also the betrayal of American principle undertaken by the Obama administration in setting such a policy in place. The fact is, relying on "local militias" was not some stop-gap practice; it was official US policy. This begins to tell us why "Benghazi-gate" is so much more than an inquiry into a calamitous security break-down, and the ghastly chain of lies the administration told thereafter.

On March 28, 2012,  Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom sent a cable from Libya requesting more  security. His request was denied. This cable, however, is evidence of more than State's negligence in failing to address a dangerous security situation that would be exploited by al Qaeda affiliates on September 11, 2012. In the cable, Nordstrom makes note of the fact that "rebuilding and expanding post's PSA Local Guard Force" was one of his "core objectives." Further: "As recommended by the Department, post is developing plans to transition our security staffing ... to [a model] that incorporates more locally-based and non-emergency assets."

...

Read More »

Libya Shield spokesman Hafez al-Aquri, April, 2012. And yes, that's the black flag of al Qaeda behind him.

---

John Rosenthal adds a shocking, crucial new piece to the Benghazi puzzle today at WND:

Video and documentary evidence shows that a Libyan-government-sponsored militia that reportedly provided support to American Marines on the night of the Sept. 11 Benghazi attacks is a radical Islamic militia that, like the presumed assailants, flies the black flag of jihad.

Over one month after the attacks – and despite a congressional hearing – the details of what occurred remain murky. But according to several largely concordant reports, certain broad outlines appear clear. It is generally agreed that the American consulate was attacked by Islamic extremists from a local Libyan militia. According to widely publicized speculations, the militia in question is thought to go by the name Ansar al-Shariah. Thus, for example, a recent New York Times article cites an eyewitness account attributing the attack to Ansar al-Shariah and notes that the witness claims to have seen the attackers “waving the black flag favored by such ultraconservative jihadis.”

...

Read More »

A friend writes in to underscore the importance of noting also the series of events that befell the consulate survivors on evacuating the sacked and burning compound -- without Amabassador Stevens, whose body wouldn't be recovered until much later. "The description reads like some of Mark Bowden’s descriptions of American servicemen surrounded by hostile crowds and armed gangs in Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down," he writes.

Picking up from this post, here is the State Department background briefing on October 9, 2012:

Here it’s a little harder to understand because I don’t have a diagram that you can show – that I can show you. But in a nutshell, they take fire almost as soon as they emerge from the compound. They go a couple of – they go in one direction toward the annex. They don’t like what they’re seeing ahead of them. There are crowds. There are groups of men. They turn around and go the other direction. They don’t like what they’re seeing in that direction either. They make another u-turn. They’re going at a steady pace. There is traffic in the roads around there. This is in Benghazi, after all. Now, they’re going at a steady pace and they’re trying not to attract too much attention, so they’re going maybe 15 miles an hour down the street.

...

Read More »

First, late last night in Peru, SecState Hillary Clinton phones it in that she has "taken responsibility" for the Benghazi -- almost literally, what with a CNN correspondent doing a post-modern "Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite" routine on the line into the NY bureau with a breathless report of what her SecStateness had just intoned:

"I take responsibility," Clinton said during a visit to Peru. "I'm in charge of the State Department's 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts. The president and the vice president wouldn't be knowledgeable about specific decisions that are made by security professionals. They're the ones who weigh all of the threats and the risks and the needs and make a considered decision."

But she said an investigation now under way will ultimately determine what happened at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed on September 11.

Then Hill went off about "fog of war" confusion, etc. (maybe...

Read More »

Time Warner's Carol Melton and Huma Abedin at the Washington, DC "Argo" party, October 12, 2012

---

As some readers will recall, a few months ago, in the spirit of columnist-bites-editor, I "spiked" the Washington Examiner after editorial page editor David Freddoso refused to run my column "Outing the Muslim Brotherhood." The column reported on a written request, then making gigantic media waves, from Rep. Michele Bachmann and four House colleagues to inspectors general at five government agencies asking them simply to investigate alarming evidence of Muslim Brotherhood penetration of US government decision-making. One of the members' exhibits was SecState Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin, whose family members, in a nutshell, have been tightly, deeply and demonstrably involved with groups and movements dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization.

...

Read More »

Just read the State Department blow-by-blow briefing, or  "tick-tock," on events in Benghazi given reporters on background on October 9. As senior official #2 summed up the attack in his concluding remarks:

The lethality and the number of armed people is unprecedented. There had been no attacks like that anywhere in Libya – Tripoli, Benghazi, or elsewhere – in the time that we had been there. And so it is unprecedented. In fact, it would be very, very hard to find a precedent for an attack like that in recent diplomatic history.

Aside from harrowing descriptions of terror and entrapment, loss and courage, what stands out is the depiction of a quiet night suddenly broken by massive armed attack. No Youtube protest Gone Wrong, in other words as the Obama White House has continually insisted, lying in such a way as to advance the world Islamic movement against free speech about Islam, whose...

Read More »

As Eyeore writes at Vlad Tepes writes, "this is quite a little report" by a Russian correspondent on the state of the Islamic takeover of Paris.

Me, I prefer director Rouben Mamouliam's Paris, via Rogers & Hart and Maurice Chevalier.

Libya's "humanitarian vulcans" Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power (Thrice the brinded cat had mew'd...)

---

At her indispensable blog Refugee Resettlement Watch, Ann Corcoran wonders:  "Are they keeping Samantha Power under wraps now so she won’t be tainted by the Libya scandal washing over Washington?  And, why would they do that?"

Power, with Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton, form the troika of "humanitarian vulcans" that helped drive Obama's Libya intervention, sending Uncle Sam to join the jihad. Rice and Clinton have been thoroughly "Benghazi'ed" since the consulate attack, with more of the same likely in store. Power, however, has not been part of the conversation -- almost as AWOL as CIA Director Petraeus. Ann thinks the silence on Power is calculated to save her from Benghazi-gate so she remains eligible to succeed Hillary in a second (please, no) Obama term. To be sure, her remaining in cognito as the Libya scandal burns is also a function of a comatose...

Read More »