Benghazi Panel to Hear from Clinton Friend Blumenthal in Private Testimony

Long-time Hillary Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal is set to be interviewed on June 16 by the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. 

The committee, in announcing Blumenthal's appearance Friday, said his deposition will be conducted in a closed session. The media will be barred from coverage.

Blumenthal has become a focus of the House Select Committee on Benghazi since revelations he has been sending Clinton what she called "unsolicited" memos about Libya, where he was trying to arrange business deal, while she was secretary of state.

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Those briefings included early suggestions that terrorists were responsible for the 2012 Benghazi attacks in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed.

Blumenthal had also been employed by the Clinton Foundation full-time from 2009 to 2013, at which point he became a consultant for the organization, which was founded by Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Democrats have accused the House committee, chaired by Republican Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, of stringing out its investigation of the Benghazi attacks to undercut Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.


Via: NewsMax

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CBS News: Obama Never Convened Counterterrorism Task Force During Benghazi Terror Attack…

CBS News has learned that during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, the Obama Administration did not convene its top interagency counterterrorism resource: the Counterterrorism Security Group, (CSG).

"The CSG is the one group that's supposed to know what resources every agency has. They know of multiple options and have the ability to coordinate counterterrorism assets across all the agencies," a high-ranking government official told CBS News. "They were not allowed to do their job. They were not called upon."

Information shared with CBS News from top counterterrorism sources in the government and military reveal keen frustration over the U.S. response on Sept. 11, the night ambassador Chris Stevens and 3 other Americans were killed in a coordinated attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya.

The circumstances of the attack, including the intelligence and security situation there, will be the subject of a Senate Intelligence Committee closed hearing on Nov. 15, with additional hearings to follow.

Counterterrorism sources and internal emails reviewed by CBS News express frustration that key responders were ready to deploy, but were not called upon to help in the attack.

CBS News has agreed not to quote directly from the emails, and to protect the identities of the sources who hold sensitive counterterrorism posts within the State Department, the US military and the Justice Department.

As to why the Counterterrorism Security Group was not convened, National Security Council Spokesman Tommy Vietor told CBS News "From the moment the President was briefed on the Benghazi attack, the response effort was handled by the most senior national security officials in governments. Members of the CSG were of course involved in these meetings and discussions to support their bosses."

FOX EXCLUSIVE: E-mails Prove White House Knew Within Hours Al Qaeda-Linked Terrorists Claimed Responsibility for Benghazi Attack

Fox News

State Department emails from day of Libya attack show Al Qaeda-tied group on radar

 

By Chad Pergram | Published October 24, 2012 | FoxNews.com

A series of internal State Department emails obtained by Fox News shows some of the initial assessments of last month's deadly consulate attack in Libya, including one email within hours of the attack that noted the group Ansar al Sharia had claimed responsibility.

The emails provide some of the most detailed information to surface about what officials knew in the initial hours after the attack. And it again raises questions about why U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, apparently based on intelligence assessments, would claim five days after the attack that it was a 'spontaneous' reaction to protests over an anti-Islam film.

Ansar al Sharia has been declared by the State Department to be an Al Qaeda-affiliated group. A member of the group suspected of participating in the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi has been arrested and is being held in Tunisia.

The emails obtained by Fox News were sent by the State Department to a variety of national security platforms, whose addresses have been redacted, including the White House Situation Room, the Pentagon, the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence.

Fox News was told that an estimated 300 to 400 national security figures received these emails in real time almost as the raid was playing out and concluding. People who received these emails work directly under the nation’s top national security, military and diplomatic officials, Fox News was told.

The timestamps on the emails are all Eastern Time and often include the subheading SBU…which is shorthand for “Sensitive But Unclassified.”

The third email came at 6:07 p.m. ET and was sent to a different email list but still includes the White House Situation Room address and a subject line of “Update 2: Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack (SBU).”

“Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli," the email reads.

Earlier emails did not go into who might have been responsible for the attack.

The first email indicates that U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and other personnel were “in the compound safe haven.” Officials later discovered that Stevens and three other Americans had died in the attack.

The first email was sent at 4:05 p.m. ET with the subject line “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack (SBU).”

“The Regional Security Officer reports the diplomatic mission is under attack," the email reads. "Embassy Tripoli reports approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well. Ambassador Stevens, who is currently in Benghazi, and four COM personnel are in the compound safe haven. The 17^th of February militia is providing security support.

"The operations Center will provide updates as available.”

The second email came at 4:54 p.m. ET, with a subject line “Update 1: U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi (SBU)"

“Embassy Tripoli reports the firing at the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi has stopped and the compound has been cleared. A response team is on site attempting to locate COM personnel.”

Via: Fox News

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US ‘too slow’ to act as drone’s cam captured Libya horror

The United States had an unmanned Predator drone over its consulate in Benghazi during the attack that slaughtered four Americans — which should have led to a quicker military response, it was revealed yesterday.

“They stood, and they watched, and our people died,” former CIA commander Gary Berntsen told CBS News.

The network reported that the drone and other reconnaissance aircraft observed the final hours of the hours-long siege on Sept. 11 — obtaining information that should have spurred swift action.

But as Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three colleagues were killed by terrorists armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, Defense Department officials were too slow to send in the troops, Berntsen said.

EPA

VIEW TO A KILL: As terrorists attacked the consulate in Benghazi, a US Predator drone was reportedly observing from above.

“They made zero adjustments in this. You find a way to make this happen,” he fumed.

“There isn’t a plan for every single engagement. Sometimes you have to be able to make adjustments.”

The Pentagon said it moved a team of special operators from Central Europe to Sigonella, Italy — about an hour flight from Libya — but gave no other details.

Fighter jets and Specter AC-130 gunships — which could have been used to help disperse the bloodthirsty mob — were also stationed at three nearby bases, sources told the network.

When the attack began, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “looked at available options, and the ones we exercised had our military forces arrive in less than 24 hours, well ahead of timelines laid out in established policies,” a White House official told the network.

Even as the administration continues to vow that the perpetrators will be brought to justice, the man identified by witnesses as a ringleader in the attack continues to walk the streets of Libya without fear of arrest.

Via: New York Post

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Newt: It’s ‘Clear’ That Obama Team Had Biden Lie About Benghazi

Former Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich took to Twitter on Saturday morning to weigh in on the week’s vice presidential debate, bluntly attacking the Obama administration for what he sees as a deliberate and intentional lie about the fatal attack in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the deaths of ambassador Chris Stevens, among other Americans and Libyans.

Here’s what he had to say:

You’ll recall that VP Joe Biden denied that he and the President had had knowledge of repeated requests to the State Department for increased security in Libya.

Gingrich later added that, in the next two presidential debates, the number one goal should be “getting to truth.”

Via: Mediaite

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Why Hasn't Obama Avenged the Deaths of Americans in Libya?

Today marks exactly one month since terrorists attacked the U.S consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing our ambassador and three other American personnel. In the weeks since, Washington has been gripped by the unfolding scandals over the Obama administration’s failure to heed warnings of a growing terrorist danger in eastern Libya; its failure to provide additional security requested by U.S. personnel on the ground; and its failure to acknowledge that what happened in Libya was in fact a terrorist attack.

But all this has obscured the more serious scandal: the Obama administration’s utter failure to respond.

It took less than four weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for the Bush administration to gather intelligence, plan the full-scale invasion of Afghanistan and begin executing Operation Enduring Freedom. By October 7, 2001, multinational forces from the United States, Britain and Australia were on the ground, linking up with friendly Afghan forces, overthrowing the Taliban and driving al-Qaeda from the haven from which they had attacked our country.

By contrast, it is now Oct. 11 — four weeks after the attack of Sept. 11, 2012 — and the Obama administration has barely gotten a criminal investigation off the ground. The Post reported this week that while President Obama has vowed to “bring to justice” those responsible for the attacks, “nearly one month later, the White House has not spelled out how it plans to do so, even if it is able to identify and capture any suspects.... An unproductive, slow-moving investigation is complicating matters, with the FBI taking three weeks to reach the unsecured crime scene.”

Three weeks to reach the “crime scene”? Within days, CNN reporters were able to rummage through the rubble and recover the ambassador’s diary, and Post reporters were able to access and photograph the destroyed diplomatic compound. But the administration can’t get the FBI to the scene for three weeks? It should come as no surprise that the Obama administration is treating the attack as a crime — but it can’t even get the criminal investigation right.

This is not to suggest an invasion of Libya. But certainly by now we could have identified the groups responsible for the attack, targeted their compounds and retaliated in some fashion. Heck, the Libyan people have done more to retaliate than Obama has. The Associated Press reports that a few days after the attack, “Hundreds of protesters seized control of several militia headquarters … including the compound of one of Libya’s strongest armed Islamic extremist groups, evicting militiamen and setting fire to buildings as the attack that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans sparked a backlash against armed groups.”

What kind of signal does it send when a Libyan mob does more to avenge the killing of an American ambassador than the president of the United States?

Via: Fox News

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Hillary Throws Obama Under The Benghazi Bus?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The State Department now says it never believed the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was a film protest gone awry, giving congressional Republicans new fodder for criticizing the Obama administration's initial accounts of the assault.

The State Department's extraordinary break with other administration offices came in a department briefing Tuesday, where officials said "others" in the executive branch concluded initially that the protest was based, like others in the Middle East, on a film that ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad.

That was never the department's conclusion, a senior official told reporters.

The Republican-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee holds a hearing Wednesday on diplomatic security in the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The attack as become a political football in the final weeks before the election.

The committee's chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has accused the State Department of turning aside pleas from its diplomats in Libya to increase security in the months and weeks before the attack in Benghazi. One scheduled witness Wednesday, Eric Nordstrom, is the former chief security officer for U.S. diplomats in Libya who told the committee his pleas for more security were ignored.

Via: AP

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WaPo Reporter Beats FBI to Benghazi, Finds Sensitive US Documents Scattered Around

BENGHAZI, Libya — More than three weeks after attacks in this city killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, sensitive documents remained only loosely secured in the remains of the U.S. mission here on Wednesday, offering visitors easy access to delicate details about American operations in Libya.

Documents detailing weapons collection efforts, emergency evacuation protocols, the full internal itinerary of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’s trip and the personnel records of Libyans who were contracted to secure the mission were among the items scattered across the floors of the looted compound when a Washington Post reporter and a translator visited Wednesday.

Although the gates to the compound were locked several days after the attacks, looters and curiosity-seekers were free to roam in the initial chaotic aftermath, and many documents may already have disappeared.

No government-provided security forces are guarding the compound, and Libyan investigators have visited just once, according to a member of the family who owns the compound and who allowed the journalists to enter Wednesday.

Two private security guards paid for by the compound’s Libyan owner are the only people watching over the sprawling site, which is composed of two adjoining villa complexes and protected in some places by a wall only eight feet high.

“Securing the site has obviously been a challenge,” said Mark Toner, deputy spokesman at the State Department, in response to questions about conditions at the Benghazi compound. “We had to evacuate all U.S. government personnel the night of the attack.  After the attack, we requested help securing the site, and we continue to work with the Libyan government on this front.”

State Department officials were provided with copies of some of the documents found at the site. They did not request that the documents be withheld from publication.

None of the documents were marked classified, but this is not the first time that sensitive documents have been found by journalists in the charred wreckage of the compound. CNN discovered a copy of the ambassador’s journal last month and broadcast details from it, drawing an angry response from the State Department. Unlike the journal, all of the documents seen by The Post were official.

Via: Washington Post

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Chicago Sun-Times: Emperor Obama Has No Clothes

The conventional wisdom is that Wednesday night’s presidential debate is a huge opportunity for Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The emperor-has-no-clothes reality is that the political forum would be meaningless if President Barack Obama could stand on the stage and boast his administration had ushered in an era of low unemployment, surging economic growth, reasonable gas prices and rising prosperity for the American family.

None of that is remotely plausible. The jobless rate has been north of 8 percent for 43 months. Median family income fell more during the Obama recovery than during the recession. Economic growth is slowing: The economy grew at only a 1.3 percent rate in the second quarter, raising fears the nation may be drifting back toward recession.

In addition, Obama’s big foreign-policy accomplishment, the killing of Osama bin Laden, lost some luster in the killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Libya and the assaults on U.S. embassies across the Muslim world. A scandal is brewing over revelations suggesting lax security for Stevens and over the administration’s initial, repeated denials that Stevens was killed in a terrorist attack in what increasingly looks like an effort to protect Obama’s campaign theme that he has degraded al-Qaida. Al-Qaida links to the Benghazi murders are no longer deniable; the terrorist group is a growing menace in the Middle East and North Africa, and al-Qaida in Iraq, all but wiped out by President George W. Bush’s surge, has made a deadly comeback.

Such developments may explain a new Rasmussen Reports poll finding that only 29 percent of likely voters believe the United States is stronger than it was four years ago and 49 percent say it’s weaker.

Still, the overriding issue remains the economy generally — and specifically, jobs — unrestrained government spending, the deficit, energy prices and development and the miserable state of family pocketbooks.

Obama’s defense, as proclaimed by Bill Clinton in his Democratic convention speech, is that the economic collapse was just too big for Obama or any president to handle in one term. Obama has seized this theme, claiming Washington can’t be changed from the inside.

Via: Chicago Sun-Times

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U.S. intelligence now says Benghazi attack "deliberate and organized"

(Reuters) - The top U.S. intelligence authority issued an unusual public statement on Friday declaring it now believed the September 11 attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, was a "deliberate and organized terrorist attack."

The statement by the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that it represented a change in the U.S. intelligence assessment of how and why the attack happened. During the attack on two U.S. government compounds in the eastern Libyan city, four U.S. personnel, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed.

Shawn Turner, spokesman for Clapper's office, said that in the immediate aftermath of the attack, U.S. agencies came to the view that the Benghazi attack had begun spontaneously after protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo against a short film made in California lampooning the Prophet Mohammad.

Turner said that as U.S. intelligence subsequently learned more about the attack, "we revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists."

He said it remained "unclear" if any individual or specific group commanded the attack. U.S. agencies nonetheless believe that some of the militants involved in the attack were "linked to groups affiliated with, or sympathetic to al-Qaida."

In an apparent reference to a series of contradictory statements by some top Obama administration officials, Turner said intelligence agencies' "initial assessment" had been passed on "to Executive Branch officials and members of Congress, who used that information to discuss the attack publicly and provide updates as they became available."

Via: Reuters

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New Ad Implies Obama Is Cozy With Muslim Brotherhood

The conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring released an ad Thursday to run in key swing states depicting President Barack Obama as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer.

The group was planning on airing the ads next month, but shifted course after Muslims attacked the Egyptian embassy and killed four Americans in Libya, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Egypt's new president, Mohammed Morsi, belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, considered a terrorist organization by some. The Brotherhood denies such claims.

Let Freedom Ring President Colin Hanna says Obama's response to the incidents illustrated his naïvete´ on foreign affairs.

"After our embassies were stormed, President Obama's administration offered apologies while the Muslim Brotherhood stood by as we were attacked," Hanna says. "Instead of confronting our enemies such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama kowtows to them." [Bachmann Sticks to Accusations about Muslim Brotherhood.]

The one-minute ad is part of a $7 million online campaign, which is being launched in Wisconsin, Virginia, and Pennsylvania with less than 50 days until the election.

The online ad doggedly attacks Obama for inviting the Muslim Brotherhood to the White House and supporting it financially. It blames Obama for the rise of anti-American riots across the Middle East, and also blasts the Obama administration for giving Egypt $1.5 billion in foreign aid.

The ad, which is filled with images of rioters, questions why Obama would reach out to Egypt's leaders when they "sought to renew long-severed ties with Iran" and destroy Israel.

Via: US News

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