Benghazi Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

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Hillary’s ‘Libyan legacy’ still responsible for invasion of Europe as Italy panics

March 19, 2017/in Featured, Immigration, National Security, Policy, Politics, Religion, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Ann Corcoran

Invasion of Europe news….

I’m not going to let you all forget that it was Hillary and her girls who were responsible for the overthrow of Libyan strongman Muammar Ghaddafi that resulted in the opening of the flood gates from Africa to Europe for tens of thousands of mostly economic migrants from the heart of Africa to countries like Italy geographically on the frontline of the invasion.

Left to right – Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power

Even Obama didn’t have the stomach for the slaughter of Ghaddafi. I followed the whole sorry tale from its earliest days here at RRW.

Of course the Europeans made that fatal mistake in the earliest days of the invasion by not turning back (using safe methods) the first boats that were launched from the Libyan coast. Now they rescue each one sending a signal to people smugglers to keep ’em coming!

Susan Rice, Hillary and Samantha Power. Hillary admitted that in 2011 Obama was reluctant to follow Europe’s lead and get involved in Libya, but that she marshaled the forces (including Susan Rice and Samantha Power) to persuade Obama to help overthrow Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Ultimately, she said, it was the President’s decision thereby tossing blame back on Obama when the results of her actions have proven so disastrous.

Here is the latest news from Middle East Monitor:

Italy panics as North Africa migrants surge

Italy will host a meeting between European and North African countries next week in a bid to strengthen support for an agreement it struck with Libya to fight people smuggling as migrant arrivals surge.

The prime minister of the UN-backed government in Tripoli, Fayez Al-Seraj, will meet with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni and interior ministers from eight European countries including Germany and France on Monday.

Last month, Italy pledged money, training and equipment to help Libya fight people smugglers, a deal that was endorsed by European Union member states.

But Libya is still far from stable. Two governments are vying for power – in Tobruk to the east and Tripoli to the west – and the country remains mired in factional fighting and lawlessness.

The authorities in eastern Libya have rejected the deal struck between Rome and Tripoli.

“I’m not so naive as to not understand the situation there,” Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti told reporters. “But we cannot remain immobile and wait for the country to stabilise.”

He said the Libya agreement and next week’s meeting were not just “talk”, but strategic steps toward managing mass migration to Europe.

So far this year more than 16,000 migrants – a 36 per cent increase on the same period last year – have been rescued at sea and brought to Italy after Libya-based people smugglers piled them onto flimsy boats.

Don’t miss Hillary cackling about her success in killing Gaddafi. She looks like an absolute loon here:

Another version of Hillary’s looney laugh, is here. Don’t you think it might be too early for her to come out of the woods!

Our archives on the ‘Invasion of Europe’ are here.

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Democrats Abandoned Isreal on December 23, 2016: A date that will live in Infamy

December 24, 2016/in Commentary, National Security, Policy, Politics, Religion/by Dr. Rich Swier

The leader of the Democratic Party has decided to abandon Israel on December 23rd, 2016 and Democrats knew full well that he would. To understand why this happened one must read President Obama’s 2012 speech to the United Nations.

Barack Obama said in a speech before the United Nations on September 25th, 2012 that, “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”

Democrats stood by the President, knowing that he was speaking directly to the Arab world, Israel, and those in the United States and beyond, who did not fully embrace the “religion of peace.”

Democrats knew their President stood squarely on the side of Islam and Islamists and they did nothing.

President Obama commented on Benghazi stating:

That is what we saw play out in the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. Now, I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity.

It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well — for as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and every faith. We are home to Muslims who worship across our country. We not only respect the freedom of religion, we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. We understand why people take offense to this video because millions of our citizens are among them.

I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. And the answer is enshrined in our laws: Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.

This about Tunisia, now a hot bed of terrorism and the home of the Berlin Christmas market slaughter:

It has been less than two years since a vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire to protest the oppressive corruption in his country, and sparked what became known as the Arab Spring. And since then, the world has been captivated by the transformation that’s taken place, and the United States has supported the forces of change.

We were inspired by the Tunisian protests that toppled a dictator, because we recognized our own beliefs in the aspiration of men and women who took to the streets.

This about the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt:

We insisted on change in Egypt, because our support for democracy ultimately put us on the side of the people.

This about Yemen:

We supported a transition of leadership in Yemen, because the interests of the people were no longer being served by a corrupt status quo.

This about Libya:

We intervened in Libya alongside a broad coalition, and with the mandate of the United Nations Security Council, because we had the ability to stop the slaughter of innocents, and because we believed that the aspirations of the people were more powerful than a tyrant.

And this about Syria:

And as we meet here, we again declare that the regime of Bashar al-Assad must come to an end so that the suffering of the Syrian people can stop and a new dawn can begin.

Each of these statements were honey to the ears of Democrats and the Arab world and the Muslim community. But for those who understood his real message, knew it was a death knell for the Israelis, Syrians, Libyans, Egyptians, Yemenis, Europeans and Americans.

Obama was saying that the future belongs to Islam. History will call December 23rd, 2016 a date that will live in infamy but the foundation of the betrayal of the Christian world was laid on September 25th, 2012.

And Democrats were silent.

State Department Nominee Must Tame The Bureaucratic Beast

November 29, 2016/in Featured, National Security, Policy/by Kenneth R. Timmerman

The way the media is discussing the choice facing President-Elect Trump over his State Department nominee, you would think it’s a choice about stocking-stuffers. Should I give Mitt the slide whistle, the chocolate truffle, or the lump of coal?

The answer is: none of the above. And as Kellyann Conway noted on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Trump loyalists are wondering why Mitt Romney thinks he deserves to hang his stocking on our mantle to begin with.

Secretary of State is one of three key national security positions, but even more than the National Security advisor or the Secretary of Defense, this is the person who becomes America’s face and voice to seven billion people around the planet. This is the person who will personify American values, who will hold high the flag of freedom.

And most important of all, this is the person who will ensure that President Trump’s agenda actually gets carried out by an unruly, often recalcitrant bureaucracy at the Department of State, filled with partisan Democrats who have burrowed their way into career track jobs to avoid getting automatically axed come the inauguration.

Mitt Romney may be willing to recant his harsh attacks on Donald Trump’s character during the campaign, and Mr. Trump may be willing to forgive him. But the real issue – and it applies to any potential nominee – is this: can he or she ascend to the seventh floor and tame the bureaucracy?

After President Bush was elected to a second term in November 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell called a town meeting of his employees. “We live in a democracy,” he said. “As Americans, we have to respect the results of elections.” Bush had received the most votes of any president in U.S. history. Everyone in this building was constitutionally obligated to serve him, he said.

As I recounted in my 2008 book, Shadow Warriors, one of Powell’s subordinates returned to her office suite, shut the door, and held a mini town meeting of her own. After indignantly recounting Powell’s remarks to her assembled staff, she commented: “Well, Senator Kerry receive the second highest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history. If just one state had gone differently, Sen. Kerry would be President Kerry today.”

The employees of her regional bureau owed no allegiance to the president of the United States, especially not to policies they knew were wrong, she told them. If it was legal, and it would slow down the Bush juggernaut, they should do it.

I fully expect the next Secretary of State will face the same type of open insubordination from political hold-overs, many of whom weathered eight years of George W. Bush. They will use every ruse to undermine President Trump’s policies, especially where those policies conflict with their elitist, globalist agenda – which will be just about everywhere.

Want to slash the $1 billion funding to promote “climate change” initiatives? All of a sudden, that money will get buried in another budget line. Want to stop spending U.S. taxpayer dollars to promote an LGBT lifestyle overseas? The next secretary will get blank stares when he or she gives such an order to the bureaucrats.

And these are relatively small matters. What about moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, a policy Congress has made law and Donald Trump promoted during the campaign? I guarantee you, the shadow warriors at State will find legal excuses where none exist, and magnify the objections of regional partners who never set foot in Israel anyway.

The State Department has many talented, career professionals, who understand that their job is to promote the policies of the United States of America as defined by the President and his Secretary of State. But it also has many secret and not-so-secret partisans, who believe their duty is to act as so many Edward Snowden’s inside the belly of the beast, leaking to the media and to President Trump’s political enemies.

The next Secretary of State cannot close his eyes to this fact. He must tame the bureaucracy and, like the Swedes, not fear to send those he cannot fire to the “elephant’s churchyard” in the basement.

That’s what happened to Greg Hicks, the deputy chief of mission under Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya, after Hicks had the temerity to testify before Congress that his superiors back in Washington had denied scores of requests for additional security in Tripoli and Benghazi.

The media will scream, and Senator Chuck Schumer will join them, calling the Secretary a vicious partisan, vindictive, or – heavens! – unfair. We need a Secretary of State who will not flinch at the slings and arrows of the president’s political adversaries, who can sweep them away with skill, good humor, and firm resolve.

Do you see Mitt Romney doing that?

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the DailyCaller.com.

Those Benghazi Stingers — Yes, they did exist, but….

November 7, 2016/in National Security, Policy, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Kenneth R. Timmerman

More than a dozen people have sent me the same email over the past couple of weeks, purporting to tell the “REAL story on Benghazi.”

Like a lot of information circulating on the Internet, it contains an important kernel of truth, namely a reference to the July 25, 2012 Taliban attack on a U.S. Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan, using a U.S.-supplied Stinger missile.

darkforces-cover That attack really did take place, as I reported in my 2014 book Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi.

I learned about the helicopter downing from early Wikileaks disclosures known as the Afghan war logs, and corroborated the information with a senior U.S. military officer working an intelligence billet in support of U.S. special forces operations overseas.

The officer explained that the Stinger never exploded – not because “the stupid Taliban didn’t arm the missile,” as the email claims (if you can fire it, the missile is armed) – but because of a malfunction, most likely in the impact fuze and the guidance system.

Instead of exploding against the body of the helicopter, as designed, the missile lodged and broke apart in the engine nacelle. The alert pilot managed a hard-landing, and everyone on board the Chinook walked away. Crash investigators subsequently discovered pieces of the Stinger lodged in the engine nacelle, including a portion of the missile casing that included a serial number.

That serial number tracked back to a lot of Stingers that had been “signed out” to the CIA in Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, in early 2011, and transferred to the government of Qatar, my U.S. Special Forces informant told me.

The email, which is now the subject of a Reddit thread, begins with a breathtaking claim:

“Ambassador Stevens was sent to Benghazi, post haste, in order to retrieve US-made Stinger missiles supplied to Ansar al Sharia without Congressional oversight or permission. Hillary brokered the deal through Stevens and a private arms dealer named Marc Turi. Then some of the shoulder-fired missiles ended up in Afghanistan used against our own military.”

The only true statement in that opener is the final sentence. (The Justice Department recently dropped all charges against Marc Turi because they knew full well he never consummated any arms sales to the Libyan rebels and bowed out once his arms export license request for Qatar was denied).

Ambassador Stevens was sent to Benghazi for two reasons. The first, as noted by his number two in Libya, State Department career diplomat Greg Hicks, was to certify that the State Department could officially open Benghazi as a “permanent constituent post.” Hillary Clinton wanted to travel to Benghazi for a photo op, to take a victory lap for her “success” in ousting Colonel Qaddafi.

But Mrs. Clinton did not want to ask Congress for a special appropriation for Benghazi, since that would have led to an investigation into security procedures at the facility. So she instructed Stevens to travel to Benghazi as soon as he returned from his European vacation in early September. The plan was to use leftover funds from Iraq to operate Benghazi as a full-fledged consulate. But those funds “had to be obligated by September thirtieth” to avoid Congressional scrutiny, Hicks testified.

No arms deal. No Stingers. No “do-or-die” mission, as the lurid email claims. Just a Hillary Clinton vanity project that cost the lives of four Americans.

“It was the State Department, not the CIA that supplied [the Stingers] to our sworn enemies, because Petraeus wouldn’t supply these deadly weapons due to their potential use on commercial aircraft,” the email goes on.

I am still unclear as to who authorized the transfer of the Stingers to the CIA, and from the CIA, to the Qataris. That would be an excellent subject for a Freedom of Information Act request.

However, I am pretty certain of what happened next. The Qataris brought a small number of them – my sources said, fifty or sixty – into Libya through Chad in late March or early April 2011. This was before the U.S. and NATO had fully committed to helping the anti-Qaddafi rebels.

While they were en route, they encountered a French military patrol in northern Chad. The French asked the Qatari Special Forces commander in charge of the convoy, who had been trained in France, what he thought he was doing. He replied that he was taking Stinger missiles to the Libyan rebels.

After a lengthy palaver and communications with Paris, and via Paris with Washington, the French officer was instructed that the U.S. government wanted the Stingers to reach Libya.

As I reported in Dark Forces (p92), Qaddafi’s intelligence service picked up the communication between the French officer in northern Chad and his commanders. How do we know this? Because a copy of the intercept, dated April 4, 2011, turned up several months later in the just-vacated headquarters of Libyan intelligence chief Abdallah Senoussi, where it was discovered by a reporter from the Wall Street Journal.

All this said, there were no reports that any Stingers were fired in Libya, or ever reached the hands of Libyan rebel groups, let alone Ansar al-Sharia.

The second reason Ambassador Stevens traveled to Benghazi remains a matter of speculation – and would also make an excellent subject for a Freedom of Information Act request (although my own inquiries in this area have been rejected until now).

Just two weeks before Stevens went to Benghazi, a shipment of weapons intended for Syrian rebels reached Iskanderun, Turkey. The weapons had been purchased by jihadi sympathizers in Benghazi, possibly with U.S. assistance or at least the knowledge of the CIA station in Benghazi.

The arms shipment intended for the Syrian rebels was a “liaison” operation, since it was carried out by a friendly intelligence service, most likely the Turkish MIT. These type of intelligence operations fall within a grey area of what must be reported to Congress.

Almost as soon as the Libyan fishing boat, Al Entisar (Victory) docked in Iskenderun on August 25, 2012, all hell broke loose. Rival Syrian rebel groups began squabbling over who would take custody of the 400 tons of weapons and “humanitarian supplies” it had brought.

Even worse: Western reporters started nosing around.

On September 2, 2012, CIA Director David Petraeus made an unannounced trip to Ankara to straighten out the mess. Petraeus was worried that reporters would blow the wraps off what was supposed to be a covert operation.

Petraeus was unsuccessful. And so he recommended that Secretary Clinton dispatch “their man in Libya” to speak with the jihadi leaders in Benghazi, whom Stevens knew intimately.

In fact, Chris Stevens had closer ties to the Benghazi jihadis than anyone in the U.S. government, because he had been sent there as Special Envoy during the revolution to cultivate them. He knew them by name; he knew their families; and he probably knew where they kept their bank accounts.

He was the “cleaner,” as I called him in my book. His job was to clean up the arms smuggling operation, perhaps shut it down; or at least, make sure mistakes like Iskanderun didn’t happen again.

We know from his schedule, recovered by journalists after his murder by Iranian agents in Benghazi, that he had been planning to meet with a Libyan shipping agent known for his close ties to jihadi leaders.

Do you think the State Department dispatched the Ambassador from Tripoli to meet with a shipping agent to set up USAID shipments? I think he was looking for a more trusted shipping agent for future arms shipments to the Syrian rebels. (The shipping agent freaked out when I called to ask him about this).

Stevens also met with the Turkish Consul General in Benghazi, accompanying him out to the front gate of the diplomatic compound shortly before the attacks began. Again, why him? I believe it was because the gentleman was the resident agent of the Turkish MIT in Benghazi, in charge of the arms smuggling operation.

So yes, there are still a lot of secrets surround what actually happened in Benghazi. I exposed many of them in Dark Forces, most notably the involvement of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corp in recruiting, training, and equipping the jihadis who actually carried out the murderous September 11, 2012 attacks.

Those secrets involve covert U.S. arms shipments, directly or through proxies, to both Libyan and Syrian jihadi groups. They involve Iran’s ongoing covert war against America. And they involve U.S. Stinger missiles that went missing.

All of these help to understand why Mrs. Clinton and her inner circle were so eager to deflect attention from Benghazi to a pathetic YouTube video they knew had nothing to do with the attacks. I call it the Benghazi Deception.

But please, let’s skip the conspiracy theories, and the lurid admixture of fantasy with fact. The facts by themselves are enough to hang a fish. Or a presidential wannabe like Mrs. Clinton, who belongs in jail.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine.

Huma Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood are no joke

August 23, 2016/in Elections, Featured, National Security, Politics, Religion/by Kenneth R. Timmerman

The Clinton campaign is attempting once again to sweep important questions under the rug about top aide Huma Abedin, her family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Saudi Arabia, and her role in the ballooning Clinton email scandal.

The New York Post ran a detailed investigative piece over the weekend about Ms. Abedin’s work at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs from 1995 through 2008, a Sharia law journal whose editor in chief was Abedin’s own mother.
This is not some accidental association. Ms. Abedin was, for many years, listed as an associate editor of the London-based publication and wrote for the journal while working as an intern in the Clinton White House in the mid-1990s.

Her mother, Saleha Abedin, sits on the Presidency Staff Council of the International Islamic Council for Da’wa and Relief, a group that is chaired by the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Perhaps recognizing how offensive such ties will be to voters concerned over future terrorist attacks on this country by radical Muslims professing allegiance to Sharia law, the Clinton campaign on Monday tried to downplay Ms. Abedin’s involvement in the Journal and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Clinton surrogate group Media Matters claimed predictably there was “no evidence” that Ms. Abedin or her family had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and that Trump campaign staffers who spoke of these ties were conspiracy theorists.

To debunk the evidence, Media Matters pointed to a Snopes.com “fact-check” piece that cited as its sole source… Senator John McCain. This is the same John McCain who met Libyan militia leader Abdelkarim Belhaj, a known al Qaeda associate, and saluted him as “my hero” during a 2011 visit to Benghazi.

Senator McCain and others roundly criticized Rep. Michele Bachmann in 2012 when she and four members of the House Permanent Select Committee Intelligence and the House Judiciary Committee cited Ms. Abedin in letters sent to the Inspectors General of the Department of Defense, Department of State, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, warning about Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the United States government.

In response to those critiques, Rep. Bachmann laid out the evidence in a 16-page memo, which has never been refuted by Senator McCain or the elite media.

The evidence, in my opinion, is overwhelming: Huma Abedin is nothing short of a Muslim Brotherhood princess, born into an illustrious family of Brotherhood leaders.

Her father, Syed Zaynul Abedin, was a professor in Saudi Arabia who founded the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs, an institution established by the Government of Saudi Arabia with the support of the Muslim World League.

The Muslim World League was “perhaps the most significant Muslim Brotherhood organization in the world,” according to former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy. Its then-General Secretary, Umar Nasif, founded the Rabita Trust, “which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization under American law due to its support of al Qaeda,” he wrote.

That is not guilt by association but what federal prosecutors would call a “nexus” of like-minded people who shared the same goals.

A Saudi government document inspired by Ms. Abedin’s father explains the concept of “Muslim Minority Affairs,” the title of the Journal Mr. Abedin founded, and its goal to “establish a global Sharia in our modern times.”

Simply put, Huma Abedin worked for thirteen years as part of an enterprise whose explicit goal was to conquer the West in the name of Islam. No wonder the Clinton campaign wants to sweep this issue under the rug.

Mrs. Clinton has sometimes referred to Huma Abedin as her “second daughter.” Whether it was because of their close relationship or for some other reason, Mrs. Clinton has done much to further the Muslim Brotherhood agenda while Secretary of State, and can be counted on doing more as president.

As Secretary of State, she relentlessly pushed the overthrow of Libyan leader Mohammar Qaddafi, a dire enemy of the Brotherhood, even when President Obama and his Secretary of Defense were reluctant to go to war.

Along with Obama, she pushed for the overthrow of Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak and his replacement by Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammad Morsi.

She pushed for direct U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war, including the arming of Syrian rebels allied with al Qaeda.

As I reveal in my new book, she worked side by side with the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the umbrella group where 57 majority Muslim states pushed their agenda of imposing Sharia law on the non-Muslim world, to use hate crime laws in the United States to criminalize speech critical of Islam, in accordance with United Nations Resolution 16/18.

Their first victim in the United States was a Coptic Christian named Nakoula Bassiley Nakoula, the maker of the YouTube video Hillary and Obama blamed for Benghazi.

New Abedin emails released to Judicial Watch this week show that Huma Abedin served as liaison between Clinton Foundation donors, including foreign governments, and the State Department.

When foreign donors had difficult in getting appointments with Mrs. Clinton through normal State Department channels, Clinton Foundation executive Douglas Band would email Huma Abedin, and poof! the doors would open as if by magic.

Donald Trump has criticized this as “pay for play.” But it also raises questions as to whether Huma Abedin and Mrs. Clinton were in fact serving as unregistered agents for foreign powers who sought to impose their anti-freedom agenda on the United States.

The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in 2014. But by then, the damage had been done.

Do Americans want eight years of a President Clinton, who will do even more to empower the Muslim Brotherhood and impose its agenda on America?

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Hill. The featured image is of Huma Abedin is by Greg Nash.

Mr. Timmerman is a Donald Trump supporter. He was the 2012 Republican Congressional nominee for MD-8 and is the author of Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary & Obama Blamed for Benghazi, published by Post Hill Press.

Democratic convention more about Fantasyland than America

August 3, 2016/in Elections, Must Read, National Security, Policy, Politics/by Kenneth R. Timmerman

If you had just arrived from Mars to observe the Republican and Democratic conventions, one after the other, you undoubtedly would conclude that they were talking about two different countries.

One America recognizes real threats from foreign jihadi fighters who seek to eradicate our existence and to replace our freedoms with Islamic sharia law. It believes that economic revival — through tax reform, trade reform, and enforcing our borders and immigration laws – holds the key to future prosperity.

The other America believes we face no real foreign threats, the economy is doing great, and that our biggest challenge comes from crop failures, rising seas, and monster storms caused by — you guessed it, climate change.

It wasn’t by chance that the Democrats made no mention of ISIS on the first day of the convention and scarcely mentioned it on the next two days.

Terrorism and Islamist ideology that seek to replace our democratic republic with a “superior” law written by Allah are a distraction from the real mission of Democrats in Philadelphia. As former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley put it: “to hell with Trump’s American nightmare.”

In his first year in office, President Obama directed the Central Intelligence Agency to divert significant assets from the war against real threats from terrorists and enemy nations to the hypothetic dangers of “climate change.”

The Defense Department was ordered to follow suit, and under Obama’s direction, launched massive building programs at American naval bases to shelter them from rising seas.

President Obama squandered billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in pursuit of an ideological agenda.

This past May, the CIA quietly shuttered its climate change initiative, since it was unable to find data to sustain the Left’s faith in its new religion that man-made climate change would destroy the earth, or significant portions of it.

Cyclical changes in our climate have always occurred and have had dramatic impacts in the past, long before the carbon emissions the Left blames for today’s droughts and tsunamis.

Hollywood actress Signourey Weaver, hair on fire, introduced a “scare-me” video by James Cameron and claimed that farmers in Kansas were losing their crops today because of climate change.

I understand that Ms. Weaver is too young to have lived through the Dust Bowl — so am I. But I would hope she isn’t too dumb to have read about it and to have understood that these things have happened before, and will happen again.

Government’s role, in such circumstances, is to extend a helping hand of solidarity to individuals who lose their livelihoods to disasters they had no way of foreseeing. Its role is not to preemptively cripple the nation with fantasy-driven regulations and shut down entire sectors of the economy.

Incapable of a sustained conversation about national security, we’re left with Sen. Harry Reid suggesting that the Director of National Intelligence should “fake” national security briefings to Donald Trump. Why? Because Trump suggested that perhaps the Russians might be able to find the 33,000 emails Hillary Clinton admitted she deleted from the private server even President Obama warned her not to use.

In Senator Reid’s mind, entrusting Mrs. Clinton with our national security secrets is just fine, even though FBI Director James Comey acknowledged she had been “extremely careless” by transmitting highly-classified intelligence information on her personal email server. Let’s not forget that the FBI still hasn’t found more than 2,000 classified emails Mrs. Clinton deleted.

Bill Clinton thought he had found a “trump” card that would earn his wife a place in the pantheon of national security heroes.

“She launched a team — and this is really important today — she launched a team to fight back against terrorists — online — and built a new global counterterrorism effort,” he said.

Think about that for a moment. In the words of her own husband, Mrs. Clinton’s main achievement in the war against the terrorists attacking us was to hire a few social media analysts whose advice she didn’t consult and in fact ignored when they informed her the Benghazi attacks had nothing to do with a YouTube video insulting Mohammad.

I’ve got news for the Clintons: our intelligence community has been focusing on social media for years. The biggest growth industry among the Beltway bandits is foreign language experts who can mine Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for evidence of jihadi connections.

That’s great, but it isn’t enough.

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta went overboard in his support for Mrs. Clinton, claiming that, if elected, she would take office as someone who “has the trust of our troops who know she will always have their back.”

Four men died in Benghazi because Mrs. Clinton didn’t have their backs. Instead of rushing to the rescue, she spent hours in meetings trying to keep Panetta from sending reinforcements to their rescue.

But that’s the other America. The America of facts.

The differences of our two Americas are many. One America lionizes the mothers of young black men killed by the police – often after they had committed assaults of one sort or another. The other celebrates as heroes police officers gunned down by snipers seeking vengeance.

One America believes that women, illegal immigrants, invalids, minorities, and people with kaleidoscope glasses constitute grievance classes who deserve special treatment. The other believes that all Americans deserve equal treatment under the law and equal opportunity under our system.

As a life-long investigative reporter, I remain committed to the facts. But I recognize that the contest in November will be determined not by facts, but by faith, and by how many believers on each side come to the polls. That is the new reality of the two Americas of 2016.

Hillary’s ‘smart power’ foreign policy makes her unfit for command

June 29, 2016/in Featured, National Security, Policy, Politics/by Dr. Rich Swier

Today’s headlines are about the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report on Benghazi. Benghazi is the expected outcome of Hillary Clinton’s “smart power” policy while she was Secretary of State. This policy is part of her platform as the Democratic Party nominee for president.

According to Chester A. Crocker, smart power,

Involves the strategic use of diplomacy, persuasion, capacity building, and the projection of power and influence in ways that are cost-effective and have political and social legitimacy.

It was smart power that Hillary used to depose Muammar Gaddafi, the former Prime Minister of Libya. David Brooks in a June 2011 New York Times op-ed “Smart Power Setback” wrote:

When she became secretary of state, Hillary Clinton sketched out a very attractive foreign policy vision that would use “the full range of tools at our disposal: diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal and cultural.” But it could be that cultural and economic development works on a different timetable than traditional foreign policy.

Perhaps we don’t know enough, can’t plan enough, can’t implement effectively enough to coordinate nation building with national security objectives.

The peace and security timetable is measured in years or decades. Development progress, if it comes at all, is measured in generations.

In February 2016 a New York Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane titled “Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall” noted:

President Obama was deeply wary of another military venture in a Muslim country [Libya]. Most of his senior advisers were telling him to stay out. Still, he dispatched Mrs. Clinton to sound out Mr. Jibril, a leader of the Libyan opposition. Their late night meeting on March 14, 2011, would be the first chance for a top American official to get a sense of whom, exactly, the United States was being asked to support.

In her suite at the Westin, she and Mr. Jibril, a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, spoke at length about the fastmoving military situation in Libya. But Mrs. Clinton was clearly also thinking about Iraq, and its hard lessons for American intervention.

Did the opposition’s Transitional National Council really represent the whole of a deeply divided country, or just one region? What if Colonel Qaddafi quit, fled or was killed — did they have a plan for what came next?

“She was asking every question you could imagine,” Mr. Jibril recalled.

Mrs. Clinton was won over. Opposition leaders “said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,” said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. “They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.”

Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “5149” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.

The consequences would be more far reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.

[Emphasis added]

Ironically is was American diplomat John Christopher “Chris” Stevens who Clinton sent to Libya to implement the “5149” decision. Gaddafi was toppled and executed by those same “opposition leaders” who convinced Secretary Clinton they were on our side. Clinton implemented smart power.

Fast forward to September 11, 2012. Hillary’s smart power caused her and the State Department to rely on local militia to protect now Ambassador Chris Stevens at the compound in Benghazi. Stevens knew the risks and expressed them in his diary on that fateful day.

Stevens’s final entry in his diary, dated Sept. 11, reads: “Never ending security threats…”

Security threats ignored because of Hillary’s smart power policies. Four died on that day, the cause Hillary Clinton and smart power.

Hillary vs. Jihad: A Nightmare Scenario

March 25, 2016/in Elections, Must Read, National Security, Policy, Politics, Religion/by Jihad Watch

Over at PJ Media today I discuss how the potential Commander-in-Chief is dangerously divorced from reality.

It’s a nightmare that could all too easily come true: the Republican Party denies Donald Trump the nomination, he bolts, and Hillary Clinton, unindicted by a sympathetic Obama Justice Department, becomes president. If she does, it is virtually certain that the Obama administration’s lackadaisical and fantasy-based response to the jihad threat would continue.

Hillary made that clear Tuesday morning in her response to the latest jihad terror attacks in Brussels, in which at least 28 people were killed.

The mass murders were “deeply distressing,” she said, but the “dream of a whole, free Europe … should not be walked away from,” and “we’ve got to work this through consistent with our values.” Her implication was clear: any response to what is rapidly becoming a state of war in Europe must not reject the multiculturalist fantasies that created the state of war in the first place. The Muslim migrants, including any number of jihadis, must continue to stream into Europe, for to stop them would end the “dream of a whole, free Europe” and not be “consistent with our values.”

Her lockstep establishment response was no surprise. In November 2015, Hillary tweeted: “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Did even she believe these words as she wrote them? She may indeed subscribe to the mainstream Leftist view that Muslims have nothing to do with terrorism, and that any Muslim who does get involved with terrorism ceases at that very moment to be a Muslim. But she has never bothered to explain how she proposes to deal with those troublesome people who identify themselves as Muslims and not only commit acts of terrorism, but justify those actions and find recruits among peaceful Muslims by pointing to Islamic teachings.

Hillary Clinton — and everyone else in the world — clearly knows that all too many Muslims do in fact have something to do with terrorism. And the fact that many millions do not tells us exactly nothing about the content of Islamic teaching, and whether or not the Qur’an and Sunnah contain material that makes many Muslims think that Islam is indeed our adversary. President Hillary Clinton will have no chance of defeating the Islamic terror threat when she is this divorced from reality.

She has been adhering to and enforcing this denial for years. In October 2009 when she was secretary of State, the Obama administration joined Egypt in supporting a resolution in the UN’s Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to the freedom of speech for “any negative racial and religious stereotyping.” Approved by the U.N. Human Rights Council, the resolution called on states to condemn and criminalize “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.”

The effect of this criminalization would be to forbid all criticism of Islam, including analyses of the motives and goals of jihad terrorists. The jihad would then proceed unopposed, as to stand against it would be “incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence.”

“Incitement” and “hatred” are in the eye of the beholder — or more precisely, in the eye of those who make such determinations. The powerful can decide to silence the powerless by classifying their views as “hate speech.” The Founding Fathers knew that the freedom of speech was an essential safeguard against tyranny: the ability to dissent, freely and publicly and without fear of imprisonment or other reprisal, is a cornerstone of any genuine republic. If some ideas cannot be heard and are proscribed from above, the ones in control are tyrants, however benevolent they may be.

But with this resolution, no less distinguished a person than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her imprimatur to this tyranny.

She affirmed the Obama administration’s support for it on July 15, 2011, when she gave an address on the freedom of speech at an Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) conference on Combating Religious Intolerance. “Together, she said, “we have begun to overcome the false divide that pits religious sensitivities against freedom of expression and we are pursuing a new approach. These are fundamental freedoms that belong to all people in all places and they are certainly essential to democracy.”

But how could both religious sensitivities and freedom of expression be protected?

Clinton had a First Amendment to deal with, and so in place of legal restrictions on criminalization of Islam, she suggested “old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.” She held a lengthy closed-door meeting with OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu in December 2011 to facilitate the adoption of measures that would advance the OIC’s anti-free speech campaign. But what agreements she and Ihsanoglu made, if any, have never been disclosed. Still, the specter of an American secretary of State conferring with a foreign official about how to restrict the freedom of speech in order to stifle communications deemed offensive to Muslims was, at the very least, chilling.

If Clinton is, against all likelihood, indicted or otherwise falters, Bernie Sanders is unlikely to stand any more strongly than she would for the freedom of speech and against the global jihad. Last October, Muslim student Remaz Abdelgader referred to Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson’s statements about not wanting a Muslim president, saying to Sanders: “Being an American is such a strong part of my identity, but I want to create a change in this society. I’m so tired of listening to this rhetoric saying I can’t be president one day, that I should not be in office. It makes me so angry and upset. This is my country.” Sanders’ response? “If we stand for anything we have to stand together and end all forms of racism in this country. I will lead that effort as president.”…

Read the rest here.

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Hillary’s Middle East Legacy: 6 Failed States, 7 Autocracies and one Democracy

January 24, 2016/in Featured, National Security, Policy, Politics, Religion/by Dr. Rich Swier

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton served as the 67th United States Secretary of State under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. The below map is a graphic representation of what occurred during her time as Secretary of State. Not shown on the map are the failed states of Syria and Iraq and the failing state of Afghanistan.

Some may argue that former Secretary Clinton was doing the bidding of President Obama. Others may argue that she had no control over events in the Middle East. However, we must recall what former Secretary Clinton said about the “Arab Spring”. Andrew Quinn, Reuters correspondent in Washington, D.C., in an October 2012 column titled “Clinton Says U.S. must embrace Arab Spring despite dangers” reported:

The United States must look past the violence and extremism that has erupted after the “Arab Spring” revolutions and boost support for the region’s young democracies to forge long-term security, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Friday.

Clinton, seeking to reinforce the Obama administration’s Middle East policy following a wave of anti-American violence and last month’s deadly attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, said Washington cannot be deterred by “the violent acts of a small number of extremists.”

“We recognize that these transitions are not America’s to manage, and certainly not ours to win or lose,” Clinton said in a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

[ … ]

Clinton acknowledged that political turmoil in Libya and Yemen, the rise of Islamist parties to power in Egypt and Tunisia and the expanding crisis in Syria were all tests for U.S. leadership – but said more engagement, not less, was the only way forward.

The violence and extremism continues today in-spite of engagement by the United States. A growing number of Muslim armies under the banner of the Islamic State, the newest caliphate, among others are creating havoc in Europe. During former Secretary Clinton’s watch was the Iranian “Green Revolution”. Debra Heine from PJ Media wrote:

If you’ll recall, millions of people had poured out into the streets to protest the sham election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. One of the leaders of the Green Revolution, the widely revered Hussein-Ali Montazeri, had issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons, but without a regime change, there was no real hope that Iran would abandon its nuclear weapons program. The country was at a tipping point, and with a little encouragement and logistical support, the murderous Iranian regime could have been overthrown. Hillary Clinton was the secretary of State at the time.

I recall a 2008 campaign ad that the Hillary for President campaign ran. It talked about who was best prepared to take a White House call at 3:00 a.m. Here is the ad:

Well the call came to the White House and the U.S. State Department on September 11th, 2012. Only the call wasn’t at 3:00 a.m. Rather the call came at 4:00 p.m. The call came from Ambassador Christ Stevens from Benghazi, Libya.

No one took the call.

VIDEO: Benghazi and the Clinton-Obama Gun Running Operation Exposed

January 13, 2016/in National Security, Policy, Politics, Video/by Defend The Border

Clare Lopez of the Center for Security Policy, a member of the Benghazi Citizen’s Commission and former CIA intelligence officer, exposes Benghazi as a complete national security disaster resulting from the lack of leadership from President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In part one, Lopez explains in simple detail exactly how the United States, led by Clinton, aligned itself with the Muslim Brotherhood in a way that defies common sense and basic principles of foreign policy.

The United West presents this three-part series as a national security context to better understand the blockbuster Hollywood movie, “13 Hours, the Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.“

EDITORS NOTE: Reader may f ollow The United West on Twitter @TheUnitedWest

Benghazi: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

January 12, 2016/in Must Read, National Security, Policy, Politics/by Dr. Rich Swier

Excerpts from the forward to Mitchell Zuckoff’s book “13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi”:

Dean Rusk,Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert McNamara in Cabinet Room meeting February 1968.

“A BLOODTHIRSTY MOB BORE DOWN ON THE UNITED States’ poorly defended diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya. Besieged American envoys and staffers withdrew to a locked room as fires set by the attackers drew closer. The Americans prayed and appealed for rescue, calling home to Washington and to nearby allies. If no help came, they feared one of three fates: They’d be killed by the invaders, suffocate from smoke, or be roasted alive. In the meantime, they’d fight.

The date was June 5, 1967.

War had just begun between Israel and Egypt, and morning radio reports in Benghazi were filled with false claims that US military planes had provided air cover for Israeli attacks or had bombed Cairo, less than seven hundred miles away. Hundreds”

[ … ]

“With no rescue in sight, Kormann took down from the wall a photo of President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. He broke it from its frame, flipped it over, and wrote on the back that, whatever happened, they had done their duty. Everyone in the smoky vault signed the farewell note.”

[ … ]

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Robert Gates in cabinet meeting , November 2009.

“Forty-five years later, on September 11, 2012, the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi again came under sudden siege by a murderous mob. Again the attackers couldn’t reach their prey, so they plundered buildings and set fires with deadly intent. But this time, no British or other friendly troops were close enough to attempt a rescue.

With fires raging, gunmen swarming, State Department security officers taking cover, and the US ambassador missing, a call went out from one of the overwhelmed Americans: “If you don’t get here soon, we’re all going to die!”

George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

It is prophetic that the two attacks on American embassy personnel in Benghazi happened under the leadership of Democratic President Johnson and his Secretary of State Dean Rusk; and forty-five years later under Democratic President Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

It this a harbinger of things to come?

Please watch 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi Official Trailer:

Judicial Watchdog on Corruption in Washington, D.C.

January 1, 2016/in Featured, National Security, Policy, Politics/by Jerry Gordon

benghazi-libya-_tecc On December 8, 2015, Judicial Watch (JW) issued a press release about a long sought Pentagon email sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and aide, Jake Sullivan, by Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash, a deputy to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, on the evening of September 11th, 2012. The Bash Pentagon email was sent just after the attack by Ansar al-Sharia and others at the Benghazi Special Mission Compound. The JW release noted:

Judicial Watch today released a new Benghazi email from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. In an email sent to top Department of State officials, at 7:19 p.m. ET, only hours after the attack had begun, Bash says, “we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.” The Obama administration redacted the details of the military forces available, oddly citing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption that allows the withholding of “deliberative process” information.

Bash’s email seems to directly contradict testimony given by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013. Defending the Obama administration’s lack of military response to the nearly six-hour-long attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi. Panetta claimed that “time, distance, the lack of adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

The first assault occurred at the main compound at about 9:40 pm local time – 3:40 p.m. ET in Washington, DC. The second attack on a CIA annex 1.2 miles away began three hours later, at about 12 am local time the following morning – 6 p.m. ET.

Due to the leadership of President Tom Fitton, Director of Investigations Christopher “Chris” Farrell, and Director of Litigation Paul Orfanedes and the team of investigators and lawyers at Washington, DC-based JW, we now know that U.S. special operations assets were “spinning up” to go to the aid of besieged U.S. personnel in Benghazi within hours of the attack on the evening of September 11, 2012. If launched that operation might have spared the lives of former Navy Seals and CIA contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods who were killed in a mortar attack of suspicious origins on the morning of September 12. Did Former Secretary of State Clinton, currently 2016 Democrat Presidential front runner deny the release of those special operator assets?

Ken Timmerman, veteran investigative journalist in a Daily Caller column declared, “Benghazi “smoking gun” email unmasks Hillary Clinton.”

Judicial Watch, Inc. (JW) is a conservative non-partisan foundation whose objective is to assure “integrity, transparency and accountability in government” often unearthing official corruption, regardless of which party is in power. Founded in the mid-1990’s it has become the watchdog of record pursuing high profile issues using the power of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and when required, filing cases in the federal courts to force open government files to produce evidence of official wrongdoing. Currently, JW has over 3,400 outstanding pending FOIA requests.

JW has been in the forefront of a series of high profile investigations. There was the Fast and Furious Justice Department Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) “gun walking” probe by the House Government Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings with former Attorney General Eric Holder. They were triggered by the killing of US Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry in a 2010 Arizona border shoot out by two Mexican “rip gang” members. The Two Mexican nationals, who perpetrated Agent Terry’s murder, using weapons sold under the controversial BATF program, were extradited and convicted of the crime in the U.S. District Court in Phoenix, Arizona in October 2015.

There is the continuing House Select Benghazi Committee investigation that divulged the alleged Pentagon “smoking gun” email and former Secretary Clinton’s State Department’s dereliction in preventing special operator aid to the embattled CIA annex team in Benghazi, Libya. Currently JW is heavily engaged in more than 16 lawsuits in connection with its investigations of the alleged abuse of private email servers by Democratic frontrunner, former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton that prompted FBI seizure of four email servers and investigation into possible national security law violations by Clinton and aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

JW was instrumental in bringing a suit against the IRS that forced the federal revenue agency to recover over 1,800 disputed emails of former Federal Elections Commission executive and IRS official Lois Lerner regarding complaints over delays in processing non-profit applications of Tea Party groups. In July 2015, the IRS released the emails under a court order by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan.

JW raised denials from the Texas Department of Public Safety and US Department Homeland Security when in the spring of 2015; it revealed the possibility, based on informed sources, that ISIS may have established possible training camps just across the US border at El Paso in the adjacent area of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. JW’s further investigation into the porous southern border influx of illegal immigrants from Central America has revealed an underground network of camps in Mexico radiating out of the port of Tampico enabling the transformation of Islamic terrorists from “Mohammed into Manuel” replete with authentic Mexican identification documents, linguistic and cultural training.

Evidence of JW’s non-partisan investigations into official Washington corruption is exemplified by its examination of Hillary Clinton’s role in the unauthorized development of Health Care national programs under a semi-secret task force in the mid-1990’s versus that of former Vice President Cheney’s unauthorized energy task force a decade later in the Bush Administration. In the later case, JW went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court that remanded a decision to a lower Federal court that forced open the files of the illegal Bush Administration energy task force led by Vice President Cheney.

The interview by my colleague Mike Bates with Chris Farrell was triggered by an encounter we had with him when he appeared at a Pensacola, Florida Tiger Bay presentation on December 11, 2015 on the heels of the Pentagon ‘smoking gun” email news. Farrell was interviewed by Bates about JW and its activities unearthing corruption and fascinating historical information that aired on 1330amWEBY on December 28, 2015. We published an earlier New English Review interview with Farrell in September 2014 on “Insecure Borders and Broken Immigration Laws.”

Christopher ”Chris” Farrell is Director of Investigations at JW. Farrell is a long term member of the staff and board of JW in Washington D.C. He is a Distinguished Military Graduate from Fordham University with a Bachelor in History after which he accepted a regular Army commission and served as a Military Intelligence Officer specializing in counter-terror intelligence and human intelligence. He has appeared frequently on cable news TV programs, Fox News channel and others.

(READ MORE)

RELATED VIDEO: 13 Hours – The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi – Official Trailer

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

U.S. Military was Prepared to Immediately Protect U.S. Diplomats in Benghazi

December 12, 2015/in National Security, Policy, Politics/by Judicial Watch

Contrary to what the Obama administration has told the American people, the U.S. military was poised and ready to respond immediately and forcefully against terrorists in Benghazi, Libya.

That’s what we have learned from an email exchange from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. In an email sent to top Department of State officials, at 7:19 p.m. ET, only hours after the attack had begun, Bash says, “we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.” The Obama administration redacted the details of the military forces available, oddly citing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption that allows the withholding of “deliberative process” information.

Bash’s email seems to directly contradict testimony given by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013. Defending the Obama administration’s lack of military response to the nearly six-hour-long attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Panetta claimed that “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

This latest bombshell your Judicial Watch has released to the public has attracted considerable media attention. Here is how the Washington Examiner reported on these revelations:

While parts of the email were redacted, the message indicates the Pentagon was waiting for approval from the State Department to send the forces in. That help never arrived for the Americans under siege at the Benghazi compound. A spokesman for the House Select Committee on Benghazi said investigators had received the unredacted version of the email, which was obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act and made public Tuesday, last year but had declined to make it public.

Now would be a good time to go back and review the Obama administration’s many prevarications on the Benghazi terrorist attacks. (A significant collection of our history-making work on the Benghazi scandal is available here.)

You may recall that the first assault occurred at the main compound at about 9:40 p.m. local time (3:40 p.m. ET in Washington, DC). The second attack on a CIA annex 1.2 miles away began three hours later, at about 12 a.m. local time the following morning (6 p.m. ET), and ended at approximately 5:15 a.m. local time (11:15 a.m. ET) with a mortar attack that killed security officers Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.

The newly released email reads:

From: Bash, Jeremy CIV SD [REDACTED]
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 7:19 PM
To: Sullivan, Jacob J; Sherman, Wendy R; Nides, Thomas R
Cc: Miller, James HON OSD POLICY; Wienefeld, James A ADM JSC VCJCS; Kelly, John LtGen SD; martin, dempsey [REDACTED]

Subject: Libya

State colleagues:

I just tried you on the phone but you were all in with S [apparent reference to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton].

After consulting with General Dempsey, General Ham and the Joint Staff, we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak. They include a [REDACTED].

Assuming Principals agree to deploy these elements, we will ask State to procure the approval from host nation. Please advise how you wish to convey that approval to us [REDACTED].

Jeremy

Jacob Sullivan was Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the time of the terrorist attack at Benghazi. Wendy Sherman was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth-ranking official in the U.S. Department of State. Thomas Nides was the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources.

The timing of the Bash email is particularly significant based upon testimony given to members of Congress by Gregory Hicks, Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. embassy in Tripoli at the time of the Benghazi terrorist attack. According to Hicks’ 2013 testimony, a show of force by the U.S. military during the siege could have prevented much of the carnage. Said Hicks, “If we had been able to scramble a fighter or aircraft or two over Benghazi as quickly as possible after the attack commenced, I believe there would not have been a mortar attack on the annex in the morning because I believe the Libyans would have split. They would have been scared to death that we would have gotten a laser on them and killed them.”

Ultimately, Special Operations forces on their own initiative traveled from Tripoli to Benghazi to provide support during the attack. Other military assets were only used to recover the dead and wounded, and to evacuate U.S. personnel from Libya. In fact, other documents released in October by Judicial Watch show that only one U.S. plane was available to evacuate Americans from Benghazi to Tripoli and that raises questions about whether a delay of military support led to additional deaths in Benghazi.

As per usual, we only obtained this document after going to federal court. The new email came as a result of a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on September 4, 2014 seeking:

Records related to notes, updates, or reports created in response to the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. This request includes, but is not limited to, notes taken by then Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton or employees of the Office of the Secretary of State during the attack and its immediate aftermath.

The Obama administration and Clinton officials hid this compelling Benghazi email for years. The email makes readily apparent that the military was prepared to launch immediate assistance that could have made a difference, at least at the CIA Annex. The fact that the Obama Administration withheld this email for so long only worsens the scandal of Benghazi.

The Washington Examiner puts it very well:

The newly disclosed email chain casts doubt on previous testimony from high-level officials, several of whom suggested there was never any kind of military unit that could have been in a position to mount a rescue mission during the hours-long attack on Benghazi.

It came out later that day that the House Select Committee on Benghazi had been withholding from the public an unredacted version of the email released by Judicial Watch. Almost immediately upon Judicial Watch’s release of the devastating email, a spokesman for the House Select Committee on Benghazi made a snide, sour-grapes announcement to The Daily Caller attempting to defend the Committee’s decision to keep the email secret for a year by implicitly criticizing Judicial Watch’s supposed “rush to release or comment on every document it uncovers.” Bad enough fighting the lawless secrecy of the Obama administration – so it is disappointing to have the unnecessary spitballs from presumed allies for transparency.

The Democrats on the Select Committee thought they helped their cause of defending the indefensible by releasing a complete version of the email. Hardly. The new details show that the military forces that weren’t deployed, specifically “a SOF [Special Operations Forces] element that was in Croatia (which can fly to Suda Bay, Crete), and a Marine FAST [Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team] team out of Rota, Spain.” The FAST Team arrived well after the attack and the Special Operations Forces never left Croatia. In addition to providing confirming details that forces were ready to go, the Democrats expose the Obama administration’s dishonesty in withholding the information in the first place.

All this goes to underscore the value of Judicial Watch’s independent watchdog activities and our leadership in forcing truth and accountability over the Benghazi scandal.

Judicial Watch Takes Deadly San Francisco Sanctuary Policy to Court

Judicial Watch recognizes that local cities’ and states’ “sanctuary policies” for illegal alien criminals are deadly and unlawful – so much so that we’re willing to go to court to try to stop them.

You will be pleased to know that JW just filed a taxpayer lawsuit in San Francisco County, California Superior Court to end a March 2015 expansion of San Francisco’s sanctuary ordinance that prohibits San Francisco Sheriff’s Department personnel from exchanging information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) about the citizenship or immigration status of inmates in the Sheriff Department’s custody. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of San Francisco taxpayer Cynthia Cerletti (Cynthia Cerletti v. Ross Mirkarimi (No. CGC -15-54250)). We’re pleased to be working with Robert Patrick Sticht, a Los Angeles-based attorney, who is serving as lead counsel in the Cerletti litigation.

On March 13, 2015, current San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi put in place a new policy directive, entitled “Immigration & Customs Enforcement Procedures (ICE) Contact and Communications,” mandating that “absent a court issued warrant, a signed court order, or other legal requirement authorizing ICE access . . . SFSD staff shall not provide the following information or access to ICE representatives: Citizenship/immigration status of any inmate.”

Mirkarimi’s new policy directive, which goes even further than San Francisco’s infamous sanctuary ordinance, runs directly contrary to federal law, which states, “[A] Federal, State, or local government entity or officials may not prohibit, or in any way restrict, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from [ICE] information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.” (8 U.S.C. § 1373).

The San Francisco Sheriff’s Department receives over $200 million in taxpayer support annually to fund its operations, a portion of which is being spent to carry out the new policy directive and train personnel on its requirements. As California grants its taxpayers the right to sue government officials to prevent expenditures of taxpayer funds on unlawful activities, Judicial Watch filed suit against Mirkarimi, in his official capacity, on behalf of Cerletti. The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction prohibiting the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department from expending any taxpayer funds on the policy directive and a judgment declaring the policy directive to be illegal.

Sheriff-Elect Vicki Hennessy, who defeated Mirkarimi in a November 3, 2015 election, has promised changes to Mirkarimi’s policy directive. Judicial Watch’s lawsuit seeks to ensure that Hennessy makes good on her promise when she takes office.

San Francisco’s sanctuary ordinance gained national attention on July 1, 2015, when Kathryn Steinle was gunned down at one the of city’s most popular tourist spots, allegedly by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an illegal alien who had been released from the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department despite a request from ICE that he be detained for possible deportation. The Sheriff’s Department not only ignored ICE’s detainer request, but also failed to notify ICE when it released Lopez-Sanchez on April 15, 2015, little more than a month after Mirkarimi issued the new policy directive.

Sheriff Mirkarimi’s expansion of San Francisco’s sanctuary policy is dangerous and violates federal law. It needs to end. Our new lawsuit should encourage Sheriff-Elect Hennessy to repeal Sheriff Mirkarimi’s policy directive in its entirety – thereby protecting public safety, and surely saving innocent lives.

As the result of earlier Judicial Watch litigation, the San Francisco Police Department was required in 2011 to comply with a California law requiring federal officials be notified whenever an alien is arrested on certain drug offenses. Our team is separately investigating whether the release of Steinle’s alleged killer violated this court order, so stand by for further developments.

JW Sues for Details on Massive Hillary Clinton Russian Uranium Scandal

The Clintons have a demonstrated record of selling their public office, often to foreign interests and governments who would harm our nation’s security. They did it with the Chinese during Bill Clinton’s administration and now they seem to have done it repeatedly during the Obama administration. That’s why we filed a new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to gain access to documents involving a uranium deal approved by then-Secretary of State Clinton that is tied to major Clinton Foundation donor Frank Giustra and Russian-state issues. (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of the Treasury (No. 1:15-cv-01776)).

We filed the lawsuit after the Treasury Department of the “most transparent administration in history” ignored a FOIA request sent on May 29, 2015. Judicial Watch’s request seeks emails between key Treasury agencies and Hillary Clinton non-governmental email accounts:

All records of email communications between the Office of Foreign Assets Control and any “clintonemail.com” address, including but not limited to hrod17@clintonemail.com and hdr22@clintonemail.com;
All records of email communications between the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. and any “clintonemail.com” address, including but not limited to hrodl7@clintonemail.com and hdr22@clintonemail.com; and
All records of email communications between the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury and any “clintonemail.com” address, including but not limited to hrod17@clintonemail.com and hdr22@clintonemail.com.

Our investigative focus is on a controversial 2010 deal involving Uranium One, the Canadian company currently at the center of the Clinton Foundation donor scandals and ARMZ, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian atomic energy agency, which recently took a 51 percent controlling interest in Uranium One. The lawsuit seeks information about the approval of this deal and whether the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) ignored the mandatory 75-day review approval process, approving the deal in just 52 days. Mrs. Clinton, as Secretary of State, was a member of CFIUS.

Peter Scheweizer’s book Clinton Cash first raised questions about the Uranium One deal, which benefited many donors to the Clinton Foundation. One of these donors was Frank Giustra, who, among other dealings, helped set up a Clinton Foundation entity in Canada that had the effect of hiding donations from foreign governments and others from public disclosure, despite promises of disclosure by Hillary Clinton and the Foundation.

As the New York Times reported on April 23, the Clinton Foundation hid many of the beneficiaries of the deal approved by Mrs. Clinton and CFIUS:

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company’s assets to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show.

The documents we are trying to force from Treasury should shed light on the apparent conflict of interest between then-Secretary of State Clinton and the Clinton Foundation regarding the expedited approval process. Under United States law, uranium is a strategic asset; therefore, a committee of U.S. government officials must approve any such deal. The CFIUS board, which reviews all foreign acquisitions of American national security assets, consists of seven cabinet members, including the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Treasury.

In 2010, Jose W. Fernandez represented the State Department on the CFIUS board, and the documents sought by Judicial Watch lawsuit could clarify whether Clinton failed to disclose to Fernandez that several executives at Uranium One made millions of dollars in contributions to the Clinton Foundation immediately before and after CFIUS reviewed and approved the ARMZ-Uranium One deal.

This latest conflict of interest is part of a wider investigation into the Clinton cash machine and the related corruption of the Obama administration.

Separate Judicial Watch FOIA litigation forced the disclosure last year of documents that provided a road map for over 200 conflicts-of-interest rulings that led to $48 million for the Clinton Foundation and other Clinton-connected entities during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. Previously disclosed documents in this lawsuit, for example, raise questions about funds Clinton accepted from entities linked to Saudi Arabia, China and Iran, among others. The August 13, 2014, investigative report that first disclosed the Clinton financial dealings, “State Department approved 215 Bill Clinton speeches, controversial consulting deal, worth $48m; Hillary Clinton’s Chief of Staff copied on all decisions,” is available here.

The approval of the uranium deal seemingly resulted in millions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation, gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production in the U.S., and made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers.

Hillary Clinton’s cash and secrecy on this Russian uranium deal looks corrupt and criminal. And now that his Treasury Department violated FOIA to cover-up yet another Clinton scandal, there is no daylight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on this scandal that placed our nation’s security at risk.

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Pentagon “smoking gun” email implicates Hillary Clinton

December 11, 2015/in Must Read, National Security, Policy, Politics/by Jerry Gordon

On December 8, 2015, Judicial Watch (JW) issued a press release about a long sought Pentagon email sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and aide, Jake Sullivan, from Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on the evening of September 11^th, 2012. The Bash Pentagon email was sent just after the attack by Ansar al-Sharia and others at the Benghazi Special Missions Compound. The JW release noted:

Judicial Watch today released a new Benghazi email from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. In an email sent to top Department of State officials, at 7:19 p.m. ET, only hours after the attack had begun, Bash says, “we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.” The Obama administration redacted the details of the military forces available, oddly citing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption that allows the withholding of “deliberative process” information.

Bash’s email seems to directly contradict testimony given by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013. Defending the Obama administration’s lack of military response to the nearly six-hour-long attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. Panetta claimed that “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

The first assault occurred at the main compound at about 9:40 pm local time – 3:40 p.m. ET in Washington, DC. The second attack on a CIA annex 1.2 miles away began three hours later, at about 12 am local time the following morning – 6 p.m. ET.

Thanks to Tom Fitton and Chris Farrell at Washington, DC-based JW, we now know that U.S. special operations assets were “spinning up” to go to the aid of beseiged U.S. personnel in Benghazi within hours of the attack on the evening of September 11, 2012. If launched that operation might also have spared the lives of former Navy Seals and CIA contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods who were killed in a mortar attack of suspicious origins on the morning of September 12. Did Former Secretary of State Clinton, currently 2016 Democrat Presidential front runner deny release of those special operator assets?

Ken Timmerman, veteran investigative journalist discusses the background in a Daily Caller op-ed published today, “Benghazi “smoking gun” email unmasks Hillary Clinton”. Chris Farrell of JW will be speaking at the Tiger Bay Club in Pensacola, Florida on Friday, December 11, 2015. Doubtless we and others in attendance will ask questions about the Pentagon and other Clinton private server classified emails.

The House Special Benghazi Committee under Chairman, Trey Gowdy (R-SC) has acquired the alleged “smoking gun” email prior to Mrs. Clinton’s October 22, 2015 testimony, but was missing key evidence they needed to be able to question her effectively about it. Since the Committee member Rep. Lynn Westmoreland went to Africom headquarters in early December to interview top officials and line officials, hopefully they now have that evidence. The Pentagon email raises questions that need answers, if the American public is to assess the integrity and truthfulness of both Ms. Clinton and former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta.

Watch this FoxNews Special Report segment on the Pentagon email obtained by JW.

Over the period July through October 2014, we ran a multiple part series called “Death in Benghazi” in the New English Review. Northwest Florida Talk Radio station, 1330amWEBY conducted two major interviews with Ken Timmerman, author of Dark Forces: The Truth about What Happened in Benghazi. In “Death in Benghazi: Part 1 The Attack,” NER July 2014 , we asked about whether resources could have been deployed in time to spare Ambassador Stevens and communications aide, Stan Smith and possibly prevent the mortar attack at the CIA annex on the morning of September 12, 2012 that took the lives of Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

Here is Timmerman’s assessment of why the Pentagon email released by JW is significant.

Benghazi “smoking gun” email unmasks Hillary Clinton

By Kenneth R. Timmerman

It shows Mrs. Clinton gave the “stand-down” order

Touted by FoxNews as a “possible smoking gun,” the email from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s chief of staff shows that special operations teams within a few hours flight from Benghazi were preparing to deploy as early as 7 PM Washington time on the night of the attacks, well within the time needed to get to Benghazi before the deadly mortar strike that killed U.S. Navy Seals Glen Doherty and Ty Woods.

You would think such a key piece of evidence would have been the first thing the State Department turned over to Congressional investigators. After all, it establishes that help was “on the way” to our diplomats and special operators and intelligence officers under siege.

Panetta aide Jeremy Bash emailed Mrs. Clinton’s top aides at 7:09 PM, to let them know that quick reaction forces, then stationed in Europe, were “spinning up as we speak” to deploy to Benghazi.

“Assuming Principals agree to deploy these elements, we will ask State to secure the approval from host nation,” Bash wrote. Please advise how you wish to convey that approval to us.”

Bash said he had just tried to call them at State, but that they were all in a meeting with Secretary Clinton, hence the email.

We know from the timeline submitted to Congress by the Defense Department exactly which forces Bash was referring to. They included a Delta Force hostage rescue team based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina that was on call 24/7, two Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) platoons based in Rota, Spain, and the Commander’s In Extremis Force (CIF) for European Command, also known as C-110.

C-110 was a fifty-man team of Special Operations troops with their own airlift, specially composed to be able to respond to precisely the type of emergency that was then occurring in Benghazi.

They were trained in hostage rescue operations and “hot” extractions. This was the Unit most suitable for Benghazi. When they got word to start “spinning up,” they were in Croatia on a training mission, just a two-to-three hour flight from Benghazi.

As Bash sent his email, General Carter Ham, commander of Africa Command (Africom), initiated the process to transfer them from Eucom to Africom, temporarily placing them under his direct orders. The Unit commander ordered his men to begin loading their gear into their C-130s. All they needed was the go-ahead from State.

And that’s where it died. Hillary Clinton did not want U.S. Special Operations forces coming into Libya with “guns ablazing.” Instead of flying directly to Benghazi, C-110 was told to “stage” in Sigonella, Italy. Meanwhile, Panetta counter-manded General Ham’s order, and returned C-110 to the authority of EUCOM.

This is the key piece of information Mrs. Clinton and her protectors have fought tooth and nail to keep from Congress and the U.S. public until now. Why? Because it contradicts all the earlier timelines presented by the State Department, the CIA, and the Department of Defense, and shows that U.S. forces could have rescued our men in Benghazi before the fateful 5 AM mortar strike, if only Mrs. Clinton had given the go-ahead. Only a lawsuit by Judicial Watch forced its release.

I investigated this timeline and Mrs. Clinton’s role in blocking military assets from reaching Benghazi in my book Dark Forces: the Truth About What Happened in Benghazi. I interviewed senior Africom commanders, unit commanders, spec-ops officers and others with direct knowledge of the U.S. Forces available for deployment that night.

In the redacted version of his testimony that was ultimately released by the House Armed Services Committee, General Ham said the main reason he didn’t go balls to the wall to get forces to Benghazi was simple. “We were never asked,” he said.

Pathetic, but true.

The Bash email shows that the Pentagon was asking – two hours earlier than previous timelines have revealed. So far, the State Department has not released the response that Mrs. Clinton’s minions sent back to Bash. But we know what it was: stand down.

Glen Doherty and Ty Woods soon found out what it was as well.

Timmerman’s accusation begs the question of was there a stand down order issued by Clinton?

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Hillary knew Benghazi was ‘a planned attack—not a protest’

October 24, 2015/in National Security, Policy, Politics, Religion/by Jihad Watch

“We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.” Yet when Susan Rice said that the attack was “a spontaneous reaction to a video,” and other Obama officials said the same thing, she never corrected them. And she gave the same impression herself when she said, “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted to the Internet,” although she tried to walk that back at yesterday’s hearings.

Remember also that right after the Benghazi jihad murders, Hillary said, “We’re going to have that filmmaker arrested,” and did so, on a trumped-up parole violation — while probably thousands of parolees have committed worse and never gotten hauled back in. The filmmaker became America’s first Sharia political prisoner, in prison for violating Islamic blasphemy law.

“Hillary Clinton Knew All Along Benghazi Attack Had “Nothing To Do With The Film,” Documents Reveal,” by Anthony L. Fisher, Reason, October 22, 2015 (thanks to Adrian):

According to documents revealed as part of the ongoing Congressional hearings on Benghazi, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil in a phone call the day after the attack on the U.S. consulate, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest.”

The film Clinton refers to is the 10 minute Youtube trailer for the ultra-low budget anti-Islam movie “Innocence of Muslims,” which she and other senior Obama administration officials, including President Obama himself, almost immediately began casting as a scapegoat for the attacks. Those attacks, however, were already understood by senior administration officials to be a planned and coordinated attack, and very much not what then-ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice called a “a spontaneous reaction to a video.”

Clinton also reportedly emailed her daughter Chelsea, who used the pseudonym Diane Reynolds when communicating with her mother via her private email account, on the night of the attacks, telling her that the consulate had been attacked by an “Al Queda-like group.” (sic)

That same night, in her first statement following the attacks on 9/11/12, Clinton wrote:

“Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted to the Internet.”

When challenged about that characterization at today’s hearings by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Clinton refused to admit that the administration blamed the video for the attacks, saying:

And if you look at what I said, I referred to the video that night in a very specific way. I said, some have sought to justify the attack because of the video.

I used those words deliberately, not to ascribe a motive to every attacker but as a warning to those across the region that there was no justification for further attacks.

Not only did senior administration officials persist in framing the attack as a protest sparked by the video for days after, one of its first moves upon hearing that Ambassador Chris Stevens had been murdered was to contact Youtube and ask them “to review the video to see if it was in compliance with their terms of use.”

My colleague Matt Welch wrote up this helpful and infuriating roundup of the administration officials and distinguished members of the intelligentsia who advocated for everything from imprisonment for the filmmaker (who would be imprisoned for a parole violation committed when he uploaded the video) to calls for “free speech to yield to other values.”…