Arms Flow to Syria May Be Behind Benghazi Cover-Up http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/arms-flow-to-syria-may-be-behind-benghazi-cover-up The day after the big Obama-Romney debate, as media and politicians were engaging in the usual after-action assessment frenzy, some of the most important issues surrounding the September 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, remain unaddressed. While it clearly matters (a lot) […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/house-armed-services-chair-blocked-from-getting-answers-from-military-about-threat-warnings-prior-to-benghazi-consulate-attack?f=puball
http://freebeacon.com/incommunicado/
House Armed Services chairman blocked from getting answers from senior military about threat warnings prior to Benghazi consulate attack
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee is demanding answers from four senior United States military officers about whether there was advance warning of terrorist threats and the need for greater security prior to last month’s terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
However, an aide to the chairman, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, (R., Calif.), said the office of secretary of defense Leon Panetta blocked the senior officers from providing the answers last night.
“The chairman is disappointed that the administration won’t respond to this basic request for information,” the aide said.
“It is nearly unprecedented that the office of the secretary of defense would prohibit a member of the uniformed military from answering direct questions posed by the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.”
Pentagon spokesman George Little told the Free Beacon: “We received the letters last night and are working expeditiously to provide a response.”
The chairman’s letters are dated Thursday. They were sent to Gen. Carter F. Ham, commander of the U.S. Africa Command, which is responsible for military activities in Africa; Adm. William H. McRaven, commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command; Vice Adm. Kurt W. Tidd, director for operations at the Pentagon’s Joint Staff; and Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/mullikin-and-smith-receive-senate-commendations-for-honorary-titles?f=puball
COLUMBIA, S.C. – State Senator Michael L. Fair (R-Greenville) formally commended attorney Thomas S. Mullikin and military analyst W. Thomas Smith Jr. for having received the title, “Honorary Green Beret,” by the U.S. Army Special Forces Association (Chapter XXXIV).
According to the senator’s commendations, presented Oct. 18, 2012, “This honor is indicative of your years of honorable military service, your military and civilian leadership in defense of our nation in the Global War on Terror; and your activities in support of U.S. Army Special Forces, the Special Forces Association, and the special operations community.”
The Senate commendation is the second set of laurels for both men each of whom were named, “Honorary Green Beret,” by the state chapter of the Special Forces Association, Sept. 28.
Both Mullikin and Smith have extensive military – and military related civilian-professional – backgrounds.
Mullikin – founder and pres. of the Mullikin Law Firm and Global Eco Adventures – was recently named deputy commander of the S.C. State Guard. Mullikin is a former U.S. Army JAG lawyer (USAR) and was attached as an international legal officer to a Civil Affairs Brigade (Airborne) within the U.S. Special Operations Command. He is a noted world adventurer, having climbed Mt. Elbrus (Europe’s highest mountain) in July and Mt. Kilimanjaro (Africa’s highest mountain) in 2010. Mullikin has chalked up multiple dives in five oceans (his most recent off Antarctica and in the Galapagos), and he has parachuted with members of several foreign airborne forces. An author, film producer, and lecturer; Mullikin is executive in residence at Coastal Carolina University.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/blood-drenched-palestinian-heroine/
On October 4, 2003, during the genocidal assault known as the Second Intifada, a young Palestinian law student from Jenin named Hanadi Jaradat blew herself up at Maxim’s restaurant in Haifa. The blast killed 21 people including four children and five Israeli Arabs.
Two of the children (aged 11 and 9) were from the Almog family, which lost five people in the bombing; another two of the children (aged 4 and 1) were from the Zer-Aviv family, which also lost five members.
Since then, the honors for Hanadi Jaradat have never stopped—and not only from Palestinians.
On January 16, 2004, the then Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, attended a Stockholm art show “linked,” as HonestReporting recounted at the time,
to an international conference on preventing genocide. Mazel was shocked to encounter there a large exhibit glorifying [Jaradat]. Dubbed “Snow White and the Madness of Truth,” the exhibit showed a tiny sailboat floating on a pool of red water. Attached to the boat was a smiling photo of the female bomber….
Mazel, in an incident that gained much notoriety at the time, reacted by “pull[ing] the plug on three spotlights illuminating the exhibit, and knock[ing] one light fixture into the red pool.” His Swedish hosts were shocked at the uncivilized behavior.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/the-stakes-in-tonights-foreign-policy-debate/print/ Foreign policy, the topic of tonight’s debate, was suddenly thrust into the voters’ consciousness by the murder of 4 Americans, including our ambassador, in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11. Intensifying the fallout of this event has been the Obama administration’s incoherent, clumsy, duplicitous, and rapidly unraveling attempt to blame the terrorist murders on […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-review-of-high-noon-for-america-the-coming-showdown-by-jamie-glazov
While the nation was focused on the economy, Jamie Glazov, to his great credit, gathered a stellar group of intellectuals to conduct a series of roundtable discussions on the Middle East and Arab/Moslem extremism ;Russia’s renewed aggressiveness; America’s possible military decline; the unending search for moderation in Islam; energy independence; and breaking away from the leftist cult and dogma.
Dr.Glazov who holds a Ph.D in history with specialties in U.S., Russian, and Canadian foreign policy is editor of Frontpage.com where these symposiums appeared. They are now compiled in his new book “High Noon for America-The coming Showdown.” As harbingers of our present national crisis they are essential reading.
How timely and ironic that the first chapter is titled “The Mismanaged War Against Libya” (March 2011) and deals with our response to the uprising against Qaddafi. Lt. General Miahil Pacepa was the highest official to defect from the Soviet Union. Here are his prescient words:
“All we know for certain about the “freedom fighters” opposing Gaddafi is that they fight with Kalashnikov in hand, and that Kalashnikovs have no history of promoting freedom…A recent article in Le Monde goes a step further, revealing that these “brave Libyan freedom fighters” are dominated by jihadists espousing the same complaints of “Westoxification” accompanied by the Jew-hatred and broader infidel-hatred that permeates the Arab world.”
For good measure Robert Spencer reminds us: “But he (Obama) didn’t explain how acting forcibly to remove Gaddafi would indeed be in America’s best interests….It is unlikely that he will be succeeded by Thomas Jefferson. The fact that Gaddafi is a reprehensible human being and no friend of the United States does not automatically turn his opponents into Thomas Paine.”
In the chapter “The Shadow of the KGB” (February 2011) Glazov assembles a group of Soviet dissidents including Vladimir Bukovsky, Pavel Stroilov, Lt. General Ion Pacepa, with intellectuals and academics to discuss Russia’s renewed aggressiveness and nuclear buildup.
Glazov is a splendid moderator whose own background in the Soviet Union gives him a unique window into current policies. He begins the discussion by reminding the reader that the United States ostensibly uprooted evil Soviet ideology in 1991, and Russia is seen as a friend and discounted as an adversary although much of its ideology and government are still controlled former KGB officers and their acolytes. Not quite a “reset” as some would have it.
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2283/Running-Interference-for-Petraeus.aspx
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 intelligence reports.
Boot, it bears repeating, has a history of performing damage control for Petraeus.
He writes:
Kimberly Dozier of the Associated Press writes: “The CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington within 24 hours of last month’s deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate that there was evidence it was carried out by militants, not a spontaneous mob upset about an American-made video ridiculing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, U.S. officials have told The Associated Press.”
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ The British Empire may have made a mess of the Middle East but at least it knew what it wanted to do with it. That is more than can be said for our latest round of aimless fumblings in the region. Our latest project to flip Syria from the Shiite into the Sunni column […]
AARP: AMERICA’S LARGEST ASSOCIATION OF SENIORS AND PURVEYORS OF MEDIGAP INSURANCE IS DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS BY HAVING ACTIVELY LOBBIED FOR OBAMACARE….RSK Click here: Largest Ever Survey Of Doctors Negative Toward Obamacare – Maggie’s Farm http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/20823-Largest-Ever-Survey-Of-Doctors-Negative-Toward-Obamacare.html Largest Ever Survey Of Doctors Negative Toward Obamacare “Is there a doctor in the house?” is likely to be […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443684104578067041987322754.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The Benghazi fiasco is a brutally illuminating portrait of the Obama White House in crisis mode.
In the 1967 film “A Guide for the Married Man,” a husband, played by a peerless Walter Matthau, is given lessons in ways to cheat on his wife safely. The most essential rule: “Deny! Deny! Deny!”—no matter what. In an instructive scene, he’s shown a wife undone by shock, and screaming, with reason: She has just walked in on her husband making love to a glamorous stranger.
“What are you doing,” she wails, “who is that woman?”
“What woman, where?” the husband serenely counters, as he and the tart in question get out of bed and calmly dress.
So the scene proceeds, with the distraught wife pointing to the woman she clearly sees before her, while her husband, unruffled, continues to look blankly at her, asking, “What woman?” Confused by her spouse’s unblinking assurance, she gives up. Two minutes later she’s asking him what he’d like for dinner.
For much of the past four years, the Obama administration’s propensity for asserting views of reality wildly at odds with those evident to most rational citizens has looked increasingly like a page from that film script.
All administrations conceal, falsify and tell lies—this is understood—but there’s no missing the distinctive quality of the prevaricating issuing from the White House in these four years.
It’s a quality on vivid display now in the administration’s mesmerizing narrative of the assault on the U.S. consulate in Libya. Here’s a memorable picture, its detail brutally illuminating, of Obama and company in crisis mode over their conflicting stories about who knew what when. The resulting costs to truth-telling and sanity, or even the appearance thereof, are clear. Nor can we forget the strong element of farce—think U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on those five Sunday talk shows, reciting with unflagging fervor that official talking point regarding mob violence and a YouTube video. Farce, but no one is laughing.
Team Obama clung to its original story—the attack had come spontaneously at the hands of a mob enraged by that now famous video insulting to the Prophet—long after it was clear that it had been an organized terrorist assault by an al Qaeda affiliate. By Tuesday’s debate, we saw a Barack Obama in high dudgeon over suggestions that his office might have deliberately misrepresented the facts. It was, he fumed, an intolerable insult that such charges could have been made about him, the president who had had to receive the bodies of the slain Americans—and who then had to set about getting to the bottom of this murderous terror assault.
