Good luck ever getting this kind of clarity out of an official government report.
A self-appointed panel of former military officers, CIA agents and think tank members calling itself the Citizens Committee on Benghazi has come out with a scalding report summing up what's known about the Nov. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans and pointing out how it was all the Obama Administration's fault.
The folks on the committee should be getting a visit from some nice federal agents any time now.
The chief finding of the report is that Benghazi was completely avoidable, and it only happened because the Obama Administration a year earlier switched sides in the War on Terror and began knowingly arming al-Qaida-linked terrorists in Libya to help overthrow Libya's president-for-life Moammar Gadhafi.
That allegation alone should have seen President Obama up on impeachment charges, but this story is not new to most conservatives, and to liberals it remains one of those "phony" scandals, largely because Sharyl Atkisson, the only big-name reporter to investigate Benghazi or any other Obama scandal, was blocked at every turn by her bosses at CBS, which finally fired her to keep the lid on the story.
The truth about Benghazi should also prevent Hillary Clinton from running for the presidency, and it should have led to a major purge of the Executive Branch, which is riddled with Muslim Brotherhood contacts, including top aides for Clinton and Obama.
But Media Matters is going into overtime to explain how that's all "conspiracy theory." (Just as wacky as that conspiracy theory that says Media Matters is paid by George Soros and the Obama Administration's backers to keep Americans in the dark.)
"The United States switched sides in the War on Terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaida militias and figures," former CIA officer Clare Lopez told the Daily Mail Online.
When the United States military was controlling traffic through Libya's ports, the U.S. allowed a half-billion dollars of weaponry to be diverted to the Islamist opposition of Gadhafi's government, according to the report.
"The intelligence community was part of that," Lopez said, "the Department of State was part of that, and certainly that means that the top leadership of the United States, our national security leadership, and potentially Congress – if they were briefed on this – also knew about this."
As the report summarized, "The White House and senior Congressional members deliberately and knowingly pursued a policy that provided material support to terrorist organizations in order to topple a ruler [Gadhafi] who had been working closely with the West actively to suppress al-Qaida."
Retired Rear Admiral Chuck Kubic said that while Gadhafi wasn't a "good guy," he was being kept under control and marginalized. Kubic said Gadhafi offered to abdicate when the uprising began in his country, but the White House refused to let the Pentagon pursue the offer. "We had a leader who had won the Nobel Peace Prize but who was unwilling to give peace a chance for 72 hours," Kubic said.
The specific attack that led to the death of the ambassador and three others was the result of a failed kidnapping, the committee found.
When the Obama Administration announced publicly that it wasn't pursuing Gadhafi, the Libyan ruler took that as a sign that he might be able to reach a deal, Kubic said. To show he was serious, Gadhafi pulled his military back from rebel-held cities, including Benghazi.
That created an opening for a plot to kidnap Ambassador Chris Stevens and trade him for the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is in U.S. custody.
The report also asserts that the Administration's claim that it had no military forces available to intervene in Benghazi is a lie.
One of the more interesting claims in the report is that the Administration's ridiculous effort to blame the attack on an anti-Muslim YouTube video was coordinated with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups that in turn called for restrictions on Americans' free speech rights. The Mail commented in its story that the claim "strains credibility," but such a scheme sounds right up the alley for this Administration, which has always played fast and loose with facts in its efforts to control the media and the free speech of its critics. It also sounds spot on for an Administration where the president hardly makes a move without permission from the communist-connected, Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett, and where Clinton's right-hand girl Huma Abedin has known connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The group has called for a congressional select committee to investigate Benghazi, but a bill that would allow that has been blocked by Speaker John Boehner.
The group released its report at the National Press Club, whose slogan is "Where News Happens." In doing so, they challenged the assembled members of the press to investigate Benghazi and to look into their report on it.
That was Tuesday. As of Wednesday afternoon, a Google search turned up not a single major media outlet even covering the story of the report's release. Every place that carried it was among the usual list of conservative news sites, except for the lead story returned by the search, which was a Media Matters article about the "conspirators" on the committee.
The cover-up continues.
Read more at http://godfatherpolitics.com/15292/benghazi-wouldnt-happened-u-s-hadnt-switched-sides-war-terror-panel-reports/#8320LoWWVyRMp2KR.99
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