RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obama-clintons-benghazi-lies-exposed/

A searing new Interim Progress Report released by the GOP chairmen of five House committees reveals the disturbing extent of the Obama administration’s deceit and manipulation over the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. As the 43-page document details, not only was gross incompetence to blame for the success of the attack that cost four Americans their lives, but a concerted effort at the highest levels of government was undertaking to cover up the debacle, deceive the public and shield officials, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama, from responsibility.

Ranking Democrats on the same five committees, who said they were not included in writing the report, dismissed it as politically motivated. “You are sacrificing accuracy in favor of partisanship,” they said in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

Hardly. Dividing the timeline into three sections — before, during and after the attack — the report paints a damning picture of the Hillary Clinton-led State Department, which knew “the threat environment in Benghazi was high and that the Benghazi compound was vulnerable and unable to withstand an attack, yet the Department continued to systematically withdraw security personnel.”

The smoking gun revealed in the report — contrary to Hillary Clinton’s congressional testimony that requests for additional security in Benghazi never reached her — was that “an April 2012 State Department cable bearing Secretary Hillary Clinton’s signature acknowledged then-Ambassador Cretz’s formal request for additional security assets but ordered the withdrawal of security elements to proceed as planned.” A Senate report, “Flashing Red: A Special Report on the Terrorist Attack at Benghazi,” released on December 31, confirmed the lack of security, citing ”extremely poor security in a threat environment that was ‘flashing red.’”

President Obama was blamed for the lack of security as well, in that he “failed to proactively anticipate the significance of September 11 and provide the Department of Defense with the authority to launch offensive operations beyond self-defense.” The report noted that the Intelligence Community was not to blame for anything, in that they “collected considerable information about the threats in the region, and disseminated regular assessments to senior U.S. officials warning of the deteriorating security environment in Benghazi, which included threats to American interests, facilities, and personnel.”

The 2013 report’s most scathing assessments concern the post-attack response by the Obama administration that “willfully perpetuated a deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative that the attacks evolved from a political demonstration caused by a YouTube video.” The report excoriated the administration’s so-called “talking points,” revealing that

after a White House Deputies Meeting on Saturday, September 15, 2012, the Administration altered the talking points to remove references to the likely participation of Islamic extremists in the attacks… removed references to the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya, including information about at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi.

Furthermore, the report states, “Senior State Department officials requested–and the White House approved–that the details of the threats, specifics of the previous attacks, and previous warnings be removed.”

The timeline following the attack reveals a carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign that began with the president, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice peddling the YouTube video story, even as government emails surfacing six weeks later revealed that both the State Department and the White House were told during the attack that terror group Ansar al-Sharia took credit for it. The video charade continued until September 19, when Matt Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, became the first administration official to label Benghazi a terrorist attack, even as Obama continued to push the video lie a day later. On September 24, during a taping of “The View,” the president still refused to label Benghazi a terrorist attack. “We’re still doing an investigation,” he said.

As the facts became known, Clinton blamed ”the fog of war” for her initial lies, while White House spokesman Jay Carney claimed the White House was giving out the best information it had at the time, but the information had “evolved.”

Other lies by the administration are also forcefully rebutted in the 2013 report, including claims that the talking points were altered to protect classified information of the FBI investigation, noting that the FBI itself “approved a version of the talking points with significantly more information about the attacks and previous threats than the version that the State Department requested,” and that even “limited due diligence” of an Intelligence Committee (IC) report would have made it clear that “the situation was more complex than the narrative provided by Ambassador Susan Rice and others in the Administration.”

The final post-attack conclusions noted that the administration’s decision to conduct an FBI investigation, as opposed to one by military or other intelligence sources, “contributed to the government’s lack of candor” and “significantly delayed U.S. access to key witnesses and evidence and undermined the government’s ability to bring those responsible for the attacks to justice in a timely manner. ”

That delay was underscored by the reality that 15 days after that attack, it was reported by CNN that the FBI was still waiting to get access to the area. That would be the same CNN that found ambassador Christopher Stevens’ journal on the floor of the unsecured compound — three days after the attack.

Unsurprisingly, the White House pushed back Wednesday, accusing Republicans of creating a political distraction. White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden claimed that the report goes over old ground and that some of its conclusions conflict with those reached during an internal investigation conducted by the State Department itself. “The State Department’s Accountability Review Board–the independent body charged with reviewing the attacks and evaluating the interagency response–released its report which specifically found that the interagency response was ‘timely and appropriate’ and ‘helped save the lives of two severely wounded Americans,’ while also making important recommendations to improve security that we are in the process of implementing,” she said.

Hayden is, unfortunately for the Obama administration, misrepresenting reality. The thrust of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board’s report was completely different. “Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department … resulted in a special mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place,” it said.

Hillary Clinton supposedly took ”full responsibility” for those deficiencies –responsibility best described by Clinton herself in a testy exchange with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, when he accused her of blaming non-existent protests for the deaths of four Americans. “What difference at this point does it make?” Clinton asked.

Furthermore, the four officials ostensibly terminated because of their mistakes leading up to the attack remained on the State Department payroll. And while spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Clinton “has accepted [Assistant Secretary of State] Eric Boswell’s decision to resign as assistant secretary for diplomatic security, effective immediately,” she neglected to mention that Boswell gave up only the presidential appointment as assistant secretary, not his other assignments. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) illuminated reality. “State Department officials proclaimed …that heads would roll…Now we see that the discipline is a lie and all that has happened is the shuffling of the deck chairs.”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/coast-guard-warns-budget-shift-opens-u-s-to-more-smugglers/?print=1

WASHINGTON – The commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard warned a Senate panel on Tuesday that shifting the focus of the U.S. Navy from the Western Hemisphere to the Pacific region will lead to an uptick in drug smuggling.

Admiral Robert J. Papp, appearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard to discuss the service’s 2014 budget request, said the service branch has worked cooperatively with the Navy on interdiction operations along Central American smuggling routes.

The Coast Guard, in fact, maintains law enforcement detachments on many Navy ships to strengthen efforts against transnational criminal organizations that “are financed by narcotics that arrive by way of the sea, leaving behind a wave of crime and instability in their wake.”

Drug smugglers, Papp said, are “growing smarter, bolder and they’re taking greater risk and increasing danger to our homeland.” But the Obama administration’s proposal to shift the focus of naval operations contained in the 2014 budget request means the Coast Guard won’t be able to rely to as great an extent on their detection and monitoring assistance in the Caribbean.

“Unfortunately, with the reduction of resources, my highest focus is for the Western Hemisphere – the arctic, closer to our shores and most notably in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific where we have the drug trafficking routes,” Papp said, adding that in past years the availability of Navy personnel and vessels “has been a force multiplier for us.”

“So the loss of the Navy ships in the Caribbean ultimately is just going to result in more drugs that are making it through,” Papp said.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/islam_coexists.html There is an enormous irony contained in the Boston Marathon bombing. When the jihadi Tsarnaev brothers carjacked a Mercedes, it had a Coexist bumper sticker. The Coexist bumper sticker is the religious symbol of the multicultural crowd — you know — all religions are the same. Well, the leading symbol of those who want […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/04/oh-oh_the_tsarnaev_narrative_looks_worse_and_worse_for_obama.html

The Obama administration and liberal policies look awfully bad in the face of the facts emerging about the Tsarnaev family’s insertion into the United States.

The Boston Herald yesterday broke the story of the family having received welfare, after inquiries with the state government:

On Tuesday, Massachusetts Health and Human Services spokesperson Alec Loftus confirmed to the Boston Herald that deceased Boston bombing ‘Suspect 1′ Tamerlan Tsarnaev received welfare benefits from the state until 2012:

State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits.

This is mighty inconvenient for the Food Stamp President who has overseen a vast increase in the number of people receiving government aid while subtracting millions from the workforce.

Even more inconvenient is the level of incompetence in responding to two notifications to two separate security organizations that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was worth keeping an eye on, and his ability to travel to a hotbed of terrorism. The fact that the administration prematurely announced that there were no larger connections, as more and more evidence mounts that their bomb was too sophisticated to pull off of the web, that Tamerlan received training overseas, that the brothers attended a mosque with radical ties, and that they somehow obtained financing for this activity while also receiving money from the taxpayers, suggests that our national security is in the hands of the Keystone Kops.

You can tell they are worried because Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick yesterday clamped down on further release of information on the Tsarnaevs’ helping themselves to money other people had to pay taxes for. Patrick is a long term friend and ally of Obama. Chris Cassidy, Laurel J. Sweet, Dave Wedge, Erin Smith and Richard Weir of the Boston Herald report:

The Patrick administration clamped down the lid yesterday on Herald requests for details of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s government benefits, citing the dead terror mastermind’s right to privacy.

Across the board, state agencies flatly refused to provide information about the taxpayer-funded lifestyle for the 26-year-old man and his brother and accused accomplice Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19.

On EBT card status or spending, state welfare spokesman Alec Loftus would only say Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his wife and 3-year-old daughter received benefits that ended in 2012. He declined further comment.

On unemployment compensation, labor department spokesman Kevin Franck refused to say… (snip)

http://sparksinmyhead.tumblr.com/post/48877315133/the-pretense-of-ignorance
About the author
My name is Eliana Gurfinkiel, I grew up in Paris, live now in Jerusalem and have too many ideas in my head. This blog is an attempt to share them with you. Enjoy!

I learned a great deal about Yitzhak Ben-Zvi a few years ago, while reading “My Father’s Paradise” by Ariel Sabar, a fabulous book on the Kurdish Alyah. He became instantly one of my favorite Zionist figures.

Ben-Zvi’s political profile is well known. He was born in 1884 in the Russian Empire, and immigrated to Eretz-Israel at the age of 23, in 1907. A prominent and very respected leader of the Yishuv in the pre-State era, he was elected twice to the Knesset after 1948, and then succeeded Chaim Weizmann as president of the State in 1952. Up to this day, he is remembered as Israel’s longest-serving president : he served for eleven years until his passing in 1963. He was also a noted scholar : a specialist in the history and sociology of the Oriental Jewish Communities.

Ben Zvi and David Ben Gurion were close friends : they had studied Turkish and law together in Constantinople, then the capital of the Ottoman Empire, before World War One. As close friends, they agreed and disagreed on many issues. One particular controversy was the character and the future of Oriental Jews. Ben Gurion, just like most of the founders of the State, believed into “modernizing” or “westernizing” the Sefardim and the Edoth ha Mizrach – turning them into an Ashkenazi-looking population. Ben Zvi held the opposite view. He saw Oriental Judaism as the remnant of the most authentic Jewish civilization : Judaism as it had been practiced in the land of Israel two thousand years ago. And by implication, as something worthy to be maintained and developed.

What struck me when I got acquainted with that aspect of Ben Zvi’s personality and life was that he needed much courage and intellectual integrity to take such a stand. He did not just give “good marks” to the Sefardim, at a time they were despised and marginalized in the Zionist movement and then in Israel. He actually was humble enough to acknowledge them – the “other Israel” – as superior, in many ways, to his own Israel. Instead of insisting “he knew best”, as a member of the new nation’s elite, he was prepared to question the accepted norms, and to look for new answers.

I have found that same philosophical modesty while reading, last summer, some of Friederich Hayek’s writings. In the famous speech he delivered upon receiving his Nobel Prize in Economy, The Pretence of Knowledge, Hayek develops a similar idea and, whatever the honors bestowed on him, calls for intellectual modesty. In his own words :

“The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/04/25/the-public-safety-follies/

Distinguished members of the bar, right and left, cast brickbats my way for labeling as the “Gitmo Bar” their friends – other distinguished members of our self-congratulatory profession –who volunteered their services in order to file lawsuits against the American people on behalf of our jihadist enemies in wartime. Later, when President Obama came to office, the same sort of caterwauling occurred in response to what I thought was the commonsense point that we oughtn’t want counterterrorism policy to be made by members of the Lawyer Left who had volunteered to work for the enemy and had labored assiduously to erode the law-of-war approach to counterterrorism (i.e., the Bush approach) – such lawyers having by then been recruited to serve in top policymaking posts in the Justice Department and throughout the Obama administration.

We have been seeing the wages of government-by-Gitmo Bar for over four years now, but maybe never as starkly as in the last few days.

It has now been reported by Fox’s Megyn Kelly that the FBI’s interrogation of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was short-circuited when the Justice Department arranged for him to be given a presentment hearing in the hospital.

In point of fact, it was not the hearing that caused the suspension of vital intelligence-gathering. It was the Obama Justice Department’s decision over the weekend immediately to file a criminal charge against Tsarnaev. Once that was done, the presentment hearing was inevitable. It is required by Rule 5 of the federal rules of criminal procedure. An arrested person must be brought before the nearest available magistrate. The purpose of the proceeding is to get him out of the clutches of law enforcement, have a neutral judicial officer advise him of what he’s been charged with, make certain that he has counsel assigned, and – most significantly – ensure that he knows he is under no obligation to make statements to the police and that, if he has already made some statements, he may stop.

http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=9089&q=8&s=37

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) vigorously condemns the actions of the membership of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), which has just unanimously approved a resolution* which endorses the boycott of Israeli universities, making it the first academic organization in the U.S. to do so.

Most troubling to SPME was the language in the AAAS resolution that targeted Israeli scholars for academic boycott based on their perceived culpability in the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The resolution speciously accuses Israeli institutions of higher education, and the scholars who form those respective intellectual communities, of being responsible for the decisions made by the government of Israel. “. . . Israeli institutions of higher education have not condemned or taken measures to oppose the occupation and racial discrimination against Palestinians in Israel,” the statement reads, “but have, rather, been directly and indirectly complicit in the systematic maintenance of the occupation and of policies and practices that discriminate against Palestinian students and scholars throughout Palestine and in Israel.”

The AAAS past president, Rajini Srikanth, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, claimed that the organization’s proposed academic boycott was a justifiable tactic, similar to boycotts used against South African universities to protest apartheid; since there is no apartheid in Israel, however, the analogy is false and disingenuous.

SPME deplores the AAAS resolution as it is counter to any acceptable academic discourse and is contrary to the search for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Moreover, the boycott is directly in opposition to decades of agreements between Israeli and Arab Palestinians, in which both sides pledged to negotiate a peaceful settlement and a commitment to a two state solution, but only Israel has repeatedly made concessions for peace. Additionally, by focusing exclusively and obsessively on Israel, and not on many other countries in the world where actual human and civil rights abuses exist, the actions of those supporting academic boycotts, as well as calls for divestment, are, according to former Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers, “anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent.”

info@humanrightsvoices.org

Secretary of State John Kerry seems to believe that Iranian elections are just like American ones. In fact, he would describe them as “normal.” At least, that’s what he told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations last Thursday in his first Senate hearing since his confirmation.

Committee chairman Robert Menendez was rightly concerned that in Iran “the centrifuges are spinning, the clock is ticking and they seem to be managing the sanctions that we have so far.” So he asked Secretary Kerry what else the administration was planning to do. Kerry had the following astounding response:

They are two months away from an election. The election is on June 14th and every bit of evidence we have — this very week or next week they declare who their candidates are — and there is an enormous amount of jockeying going on with the obvious normal struggle for attention between hard-liners and people who might want to make an agreement etc. We all know what life is like here in the Senate six months from a presidential election, so you can imagine what it’s like there two months from theirs. And so I think this is a moment for us to be a little patient.

http://q4j-middle-east.com  Mitt Romney was not my pick for Obama’s opponent in the 2012 presidential election. I felt that he didn’t have what it would take to defeat someone who was Santa Claus, Farakhan’s messiah, and master of Chicago politics all rolled up into one candidate.   Please note that I say the above as a […]

http://washingtonexaminer.com/jed-babbin-what-must-be-done-to-prevent-future-bostons/article/2528029

Since 9/11, we have turned ourselves inside out to prevent terror attacks.

We went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. We created the Department of Homeland Security and all its trappings, including the Transportation Security Administration, and told U.S. intelligence agencies to share information among themselves and with the cops.

But it wasn’t our huge security apparatus that prevented Richard Reid from blowing his shoe bomb, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from stuffing explosives in his underwear and so many others, like the would-be Times Square bomber, from killing people by the hundreds.

It was just luck, and the bravery of private citizens on the spot, that blocked those attacks. We weren’t lucky when Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people at Fort Hood while shouting “Allah akbar.”

And now, with the Boston Marathon bombing, it appears our luck has run out. So what do we do now?

There is a lot we can do, but none of it will be done while President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are in charge.

First and most obviously, people such as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving alleged Boston bomber, should be declared enemy combatants and sent to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation, trial and punishment.

It is constitutional and legal to do so, even in the case of American citizens, as the Supreme Court said in 1942 (in Ex Parte Quirin) and again in 2002 (in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld). The White House’s refusal to

do that is purely political, and it is wrong.

It’s wrong because these terrorists aren’t just guilty of criminal acts. They usually know information that can be used to stop other attacks and that can’t be garnered in civilian custody.

They adhere to an Islamist ideology, which is the equivalent of a foreign nation. It requires war with us and deserves to be fought as much as those who adhere to it. To fight that ideology effectively requires us to judge them under the law of war, a different standard from that to which we hold civilians.