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This will only get worse…..

Classified Cable From Benghazi Warned That Consulate Couldn’t Withstand a ‘Coordinated Attack’ (3 UPDATES!!)

Chron, Thursday, November 1, 2012

Let me get this straight. A month before the attack in Libya, an Aug. 16th secret cable was sent to Sec Hillary Clinton and others in the State Department from the senior security officer that said the Benghazi consulate could not be protected, and the mainstream media is completely ignoring it? Imagine for a moment if Bush was President. It would be on a 24/7 news loop on all networks, including the news that Pres. Obama misled Americans on purpose on why the attack happened at Benghazi by blaming it on a video over and over. This cable also tells us that the administration lied about not having any warning of this attack. Our Ambassador and four other Americans are DEAD, and our media (other than Fox News) doesn’t see this as newsworthy. The mainstream media doesn’t want anything to hurt Obama re-election campaign, and that is why true journalism is dead.

Yes, Fox New’s opinion shows are conservative, but no matter what part of the political spectrum you fall into, if you want ALL the news, you should be watching Fox News.

The U.S. Mission in Benghazi convened an “emergency meeting” less than a month before the assault that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, because Al Qaeda had training camps in Benghazi and the consulate could not defend against a “coordinated attack,” according to a classified cable reviewed by Fox News.

Continue reading “Penguin: (Un)Classified Cable – Three Updates All Sad”

2012/11/032012/11/03

DefDog: Benghazi Update — In Three Parts

Government, Ineptitude, Military

Mysteries of Benghazi

Scott Johnson in Benghazigate

PowerLine, Posted on November 3, 2012

Even for one who follows the news obsessively, it has been extremely difficult to keep up with the developments in the Benghazigate story this week. In the lead editorial of the new issue of the Weekly Standard that is out this morning, our friend Steve Hayes usefully summarizes the Benghazi story with an emphasis on the open questions:

The Benghazi debacle is a drama in three parts: the lack of security before the attacks, the flaccid response during the attacks, and the misleading narrative after the attacks. There are unanswered questions about each part. Here are some of the most important.

Continue reading “DefDog: Benghazi Update — In Three Parts”

2012/11/032012/11/03

DefDog: Benghazi Round-Up Plus Meta-RECAP

Government, Ineptitude, Military

By Paul Wolfowitz no less. Worth a full read, with two comments from readers also included.

Distrust but verify

Paul Wolfowitz | October 31, 2012, 9:19 am

It is hard to understand why Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, in discussing the US response to the attacks on two US facilities in Benghazi, Libya, offered this novel principle as a guide for US action – or inaction – during that crisis: “A basic principle is you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on.”

Of course, no such “basic principle” governs the conduct of US military personnel in Afghanistan and elsewhere, who regularly go “into harm’s way” without “knowing what’s going on,” particularly when they know that American lives are in danger.

Panetta’s comment made it inevitable that people would question – as I did myself – President Obama’s claim that “The minute I found out what was happening . . . I gave the directive to make sure we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to do. I guarantee you everybody in the CIA and military knew the number-one priority was making sure our people are safe.” If that was true, did Panetta’s comment mean that the military was disregarding a clear instruction from the president?

Continue reading “DefDog: Benghazi Round-Up Plus Meta-RECAP”

2012/11/022012/11/02

Mini-Me: WIll De-Classified Watergate Archives Document CIA Orders to Murder US Citizens Including Jack Anderson, and CIA Break-Ins Within the USA?

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government

Huh?

Judge Orders DOJ to Justify Secrecy of Watergate-era Wiretaps

The BLT Blog of Legal Times, November 02, 2012

A federal judge in Washington today ordered the U.S. Justice Department to justify the continued need for secrecy over certain Watergate-era wiretap and grand jury records that remain sealed in a high-profile criminal prosecution.

Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia told the government to send him copies of documents placed under seal in the criminal case against G. Gordon Liddy, charged in connection with the burglary at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The sealed records include grand jury information and “documents reflecting the content of illegally obtained wiretaps.”

Government lawyers oppose the public disclosure of any papers about illegally obtained wiretaps tied to the Watergate scandal. The Justice Department this summer, in response to a demand for those records, argued there's no First Amendment or public right of access to illegally obtained wiretaps. Historical or scholarly interest, the government said, doesn't justify discretionary disclosure.

DOJ lawyers said in their brief to Lamberth that “we are unaware of any court that has unsealed previously undisclosed illegal wiretap content for reasons for historical interest.”

Lamberth's ruling today was issued in a case in which a historian of the presidency of Richard Nixon requested access to court documents that were sealed in the Liddy case in Washington's federal trial court. Liddy was convicted in 1973 on charges that included burglary and conspiracy rooted in the Watergate Hotel break-in.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: WIll De-Classified Watergate Archives Document CIA Orders to Murder US Citizens Including Jack Anderson, and CIA Break-Ins Within the USA?”

2012/11/02

NIGHTWATCH: Syria & Libya Update – US Poor Judgment Faulty Intelligence on Multiple Levels

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military

ME NA Enhanced — Click on Image to Enlarge

Syria-US: US can no longer support the Syrian National Council (SNC) as the “visible leader” of opposition forces. US Secretary of State Clinton and other U.S. officials reportedly are fed up with infighting among the SNC leaders and have become convinced that the group does not represent the interests of all ethnic and religious groups in Syria. Ms. Clinton said there is a need for an official opposition umbrella which rejects “efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution.

Comment: More than 18 months into a rebellion of sorts, this is an astonishing admission of poor judgment and faulty political intelligence on multiple levels. It seems to have taken a year and a half for the US government to appreciate that the Syrian expatriates have no influence over the fighting in Syria. No fighting groups respond to their direction. No fighting groups depend on their dispensation of American funds.

Spokesmen for various Syrian fighting groups have been denouncing the expatriate politicians and the SNC as venal and out of touch for 18 months, openly and sometimes bitterly. The SNC has experienced repeated desertions by its most capable leaders, who also denounced its feckless venality.

The fighting will not stop in Syria because the SNC gets cut off. Even were the Free Syrian Army, which operates in Syria as one of many fighting groups, to lose its funding and supplies, fighting would continue because the rebellion appears to have been hijacked by the jihadists. They do not rely on the West or the US for support, though they will purloin it if given the opportunity.

Libya: Update. On 1 November, about 100 Libyan fighters have circled and occupied the Libyan national assembly to protest the new cabinet lineup.

Comment: Judging from the large number of documents about security in Benghazi that have been leaked or found in Benghazi, the cabinet in Tripoli does not govern Libya beyond parts of Tripoli. The fragmentation of the state actually worsened with the killing of Qadhafi.

If the news and leaked reports may be trusted, Libya has become a political fiction, like Somalia. Cyrenaica, eastern Libya, is an al Qaida base, training location and arms depot for jihadists in Syria and Mali. The rest of Libya is a mélange of competing tribal territories. Libya seems to have devolved as a nation-state – gone backwards.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

2012/11/01

DefDog: CIA offers detailed account of attack in Libya

DoD, Government

CIA rushed to save diplomats as Libya attack was underway

Greg Miller

Washington Post, 1 November 2012

The CIA rushed security operatives to an American diplomatic compound in Libya within 25 minutes after it had come under attack and played a more central role in the effort to fend off a night-long siege than has been publicly acknowledged, U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday.

The agency mobilized the evacuation effort, took control of an unarmed U.S. military drone to map possible escape routes, dispatched an emergency security team from Tripoli, the capital, and chartered aircraft that ultimately carried surviving U.S. personnel to safety on Sept. 12, U.S. officials said.

. . . . . . .

Instead, U.S. intelligence officials insisted that CIA operatives in Benghazi and Tripoli made decisions rapidly throughout the assault with no interference from Washington, even while acknowledging that CIA security forces were badly outmatched and largely unable to mobilize Libyan security teams until it was too late.

Among the new disclosures is that the CIA station chief in Tripoli sent an emergency security force, with about a half-dozen agency operatives as well as two U.S. military personnel, to Benghazi aboard a hastily chartered aircraft while the attack was underway.

Read full article.

Continue reading “DefDog: CIA offers detailed account of attack in Libya”

2012/11/012012/11/01

GI Wilson: American Thinker on US Arms Smuggling into Syria as Root of Benghazi Attack + Libya / Syria / Video Meta-RECAP

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude

Benghazi Reveals Obama-Islamist Alliance

By James Lewis

American Thinker, November 1, 2012

The nature of the Benghazi disaster is now clear. Ambassador Stevens was engaged in smuggling sizable quantities of Libyan arms from the destroyed Gaddafi regime to the Syrian rebels, to help overthrow the Assad regime in Syria. Smuggling arms to the so-called “Free Syrian Army” is itself a huge gamble, but Obama has been a gambler with human lives over the last four years, as shown by the tens of thousands of Arabs who have died in the so-called Arab Spring — which has brought nothing but disaster to the Arab world.

For the last four years, the Obama policy has been to offer aid and comfort violent Islamic radicals in the delusional belief that their loyalty can be bought. We therefore betrayed Hosni Mubarak, our 30-year ally in Egypt, so that the Muslim Brotherhood led by Muhammed Morsi could take over. Obama indeed demanded publicly that Mubarak resign, for reasons that never made any sense at all. Egypt went into a political and economic tailspin, and the Muslim Brotherhood were elected. The Muslim radicals have now purged the only other viable political force, the army and police, to protect their monopoly on power. We have colluded in that betrayal.

Continue reading “GI Wilson: American Thinker on US Arms Smuggling into Syria as Root of Benghazi Attack + Libya / Syria / Video Meta-RECAP”