Category: Libya

Benghazi Strategy: Bureaucratic Twister Until Americans Get Bored, Or Something

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by Smitty

Per HotAir, the latest position in the Benghazi cover-up is that the “Office of the DNI” is the bad. . .guy. Unclear at this point was whether:

  • The room where the DNI himself sits is haunted, and that some leftover from a Stephen King novel is making random edits to computer files, or
  • James Clapper, the no-kidding DNI, did the deed, or,
  • Maybe it was a the Microsoft Office of the DNI, in the conference room with the macro, or,
  • Some intern escapee from a Dilbert cartoon got his editorial jollies with the CIA memo.

What’s totally clear at this point is that Chris Cassone has written the definitive tune on the topic, which bears viral transmission wherever patriots be found.

Sun Rises In East, And President Obama Knew About Benghazi

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by Smitty

We explore realms of the obvious:

In a blockbuster report, John Solomon, the former Associated Press and Post reporter, has ferreted out the president’s daily brief that informed him within 72 hours of the Sept. 11 attack that the Benghazi attack was a jihadist operation.

Citing officials directly familiar with the information, Solomon writes in the Washington Guardian that Obama and other administration officials were told that “that the attack was likely carried out by local militia and other armed extremists sympathetic to al-Qaida in the region.”

. . .

How could the president and his senior staff then have allowed (or rather, sent) Rice to go out to tell an entirely different tale to the American people on Sept. 16 on five TV shows?

One explanation might be that the President figures we “can’t handle the truth”. And by “can’t handle” I mean “do not deserve” or “lack the power to hold him to anything like doing the job of President”.

Chris Cassone has recorded the Benghazi anthem. Spread it virally. May the deaths of Stevens, Smith, Woods and Doherty, arguably the most blatant combat snuffing since Uriah the Hittite, be a millstone about Obama’s neck.

Aside: just to let you know how far America has fallen, the Russian government has passed a budget, while a buried Ronald Reagan spins with sufficient angular velocity for use as a stable element.

via Insty

Obama Administration’s Benghazi Gambit: Protect Rice, Scapegoat CIA

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A suspiciously timely scoop:

CBS News has obtained the CIA talking points given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on Sept. 15 regarding the fatal attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, four days earlier. CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan says the talking points, which were also given to members of the House intelligence committee, make no reference to terrorism being a likely factor in the assault, which left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead.
Rice . . . has been attacked by Republican lawmakers for saying . . . on Sept. 16 that all indications were the attack “began spontaneously” – suggesting it likely sprang from a protest against an anti-Muslim video found on the Internet. Protests of that nature had been seen in other Muslim nations in the days and weeks before the Benghazi attack.
“Available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault… There are indications that extremists participated,” read the CIA’s talking points.

Ed Morrissey observes:

It seems interesting this CBS scoop comes shortly before both the current and former directors of the CIA will testify as to what they know about the terrorist attack on our consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi. Why, it’s almost as if someone at the White House or State Department wanted to follow up on Barack Obama’s defense of Susan Rice during yesterday’s press conference and pre-empt any potential fallout from whatever Mike Morell and David Petraeus have to say today and tomorrow.

Extreme naïveté is necessary to believe anything the Obama administration says and extreme cynicism is necessary to pretend that the Obama administration is telling the truth. So, are the pro-Obama media naive fools or cynical hacks? We report. You decide.

Meanwhile, Jill Kelley has lost her “honorary consul general” privileges, whatever the heck that means.

 

Heckuva Job, Susan Rice!

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She went all over TV and repeated the administration’s lies about Libya, and how dare you criticize her!

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham both said today that they want to have Watergate-style hearings on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and said that if you nominate Susan Rice to be secretary of state, they will do everything in their power to block her nomination. As Senator Graham said, he simply doesn’t trust Ambassador Rice after what she said about Benghazi. I’d like your reaction to that. And would those threats deter you from making a nomination like that?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, first of all, I’m not going to comment at this point on various nominations that I’ll put forward to fill out my Cabinet for the second term. Those are things that are still being discussed.
But let me say specifically about Susan Rice, she has done exemplary work. She has represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations with skill and professionalism and toughness and grace. As I’ve said before, she made an appearance at the request of the White House in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her. If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me. And I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received and to besmirch her reputation is outrageous.
And you know, we’re after an election now. I think it is important for us to find out exactly what happened in Benghazi, and I’m happy to cooperate in any ways that Congress wants. We have provided every bit of information that we have, and we will continue to provide information. And we’ve got a full-blown investigation, and all that information will be disgorged to Congress.
And I don’t think there’s any debate in this country that when you have four Americans killed, that’s a problem. And we’ve got to get to the bottom of it, and there needs to be accountability. We’ve got to bring those who carried it out to justice. They won’t get any debate from me on that.
But when they go after the U.N. ambassador, apparently because they think she’s an easy target, then they’ve got a problem with me. And should I choose — if I think that she would be the best person to serve America in the capacity — the State Department, then I will nominate her. That’s not a determination that I’ve made yet.

This is the moral lesson that Obama is teaching your children: Successful liars deserve to be praised and rewarded. Obama keeps saying that he’s going to “get to the bottom of it,” as if his own failures were not at “the bottom of it.” Ace of Spades comments:

Ed Henry points out that Obama admitted what had long been assumed (but not explicitly said), that Susan Rice was sent out to talk about Benghazi at the White House’s request.

Exactly: They pick this liberal ideologue — a State Department stooge who knows nothing about terrorism, nothing about intelligence, nothing about the military — hand her the dishonest talking points, and send her out to parrot their propaganda. When Rice’s explanation is proved false, then Obama starts saying he’s going to “get to the bottom of it,” as if someone else were responsible for crafting these lies which were calculated to benefit him politically.

Is Krauthammer Right?

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The Great Brain says the Obama administration used David Petraeus’s sex scandal to compel him “to give the administration line” about Benghazi in the CIA director’s Sept. 12 testimony:

This is a very serious accusation, and one I am certainly not prepared to endorse until we have some clear evidence or testimony to support it. Yet I think Krauthammer’s commentary reinforces what I said in an earlier reply to commenter McGehee:

McGehee, you express a widespread attitude, that the Petraeus scandal is somehow a “distraction” from Benghazi, whereas I see it as an integral part of the Benghazi story, illustrating the fundamental unseriousness of national security policy in the Obama age. The CIA chief is canoodling with his biographer who is so flaky that she starts sending threatening e-mails to this Kelley woman? And this Kelley woman, who imagines herself deserving of diplomatic protection, is meanwhile carrying on an extensive correspondence with the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan? This does not speak of a strict attentiveness to duty on the part of Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Allen, at the very least. This evidence of unseriousness at the highest levels of our national security institutions might very well explain how things could go so badly wrong in Benghazi. So we can walk and chew gum at the same time: Follow the Petraeus scandal without forgetting that the reason it matters is because of what happened in Benghazi.

It is possible that the Petraeus scandal leads nowhere. On the other hand, it may prove to be a central element of this developing story about Benghazi. You don’t always know where a story is going to lead when you begin reporting it. Bill Gertz at the Free Beacon has an excellent summary of the Petraeus scandal to date, and CBS News has more background on Gen. Allen’s situation:

CBS News correspondent Bob Orr says Pentagon and FBI sources describe the communications as “potentially inappropriate” and “flirtatious,” and another source says they were likely more than just innocent exchanges — noting that the Pentagon’s Inspector General is involved for a reason.
Among the hundreds of emails exchanged between Allen and Kelly – Orr reports that investigators are focusing on one from several months ago. In it, Allen told Kelley he’d just received an anonymous email warning him to stay away from her.
Sources say that the anonymous email came from Broadwell, Petraeus’ mistress, who allegedly warned Gen. Allen that Kelley was “a seductress.”
Broadwell allegedly sent similar warnings to other military officers at the U.S. Central Command, located near Kelley’s Tampa home.

In order to protect her adulterous relationship with Petraeus, it seems, Paula Broadwell maligned Mrs. Kelley in a series of anonymous e-mails. Nevertheless, even if Jill Kelley is not a “seductress,” as Broadwell claimed, she does seem kind of flaky. Her “social liaison” title? Made up:

“There’s no such thing,” one officer told us. The made-up title appears to be a polite way of saying “rich Tampa socialite who likes to hang with four-star generals.”

Obama just gave a press conference and said, Blah, blah, blah.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal expands the story:

[A]t one point in the summer, after the investigation began pointing to larger potential national security issues, Ms. Kelley tried to get the FBI to drop the matter. The people said she made the request because she was worried about the personal information being provided to investigators.
Ms. Kelley, a 37-year-old volunteer who organized social events for military personnel, developed misgivings after friends in her Tampa social circle urged her to drop the matter, saying the probe would only cause bigger problems . . .
Gen. Allen has told associates he became entangled in the Petraeus adultery scandal a few months ago, when he received an email later traced to Ms. Broadwell, the official familiar with his thinking said.
Ms. Broadwell, whose extramarital affair with Mr. Petraeus had ended by then, believed that Ms. Kelley may have been a romantic rival, according to this official. Besides the emails sent directly to Ms. Kelley, she also sent a flurry of emails from a pseudonymous account to senior military officials, denigrating Ms. Kelley, the official said.
In the email received by Gen. Allen, Ms. Broadwell — writing under the pseudonym KelleyPatrol — described Ms. Kelley as a “seductress” and warned the general about being entangled in a relationship with her . . .
Gen. Allen was concerned by that email and forwarded it to Ms. Kelley . . .

Good Lord.

 

Bad Memories of Bayshore Boulevard

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(Left to right) Natalie Khawam, Gen. David Petraeus, Dr. Scott Kelley,
Jill Kelley and Holly Petraeus at a party in Tampa.

It was August and a hurricane was hovering off the Florida coast that Monday afternoon in Tampa when I set out to find Jim Antle. The senior editor of The American Spectator had my credentials for the Republican National Convention and, at least in my understanding, had agreed to meet me downtown to give them to me.

But after a morning spent coping with traffic hassles — security had Tampa gridlocked — and finally walking the final blocks to reach the hotel that served as media headquarters for the convention, I’d been horrified to learn that Antle wasn’t downtown. He had picked up the credentials and gone back to the apartment where he was staying several miles south, near MacDill Air Force Base.

So now I had to walk more than a mile back to my car and drive to where Antle was, and this turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare. The direct route via Highway 618 to Highway 573 had been shut down by police, and so I was forced to navigate by surface streets without a GPS.

At one point, I found myself lost on Davis Island and had to stop into a 7-Eleven to check a map: Bayshore Boulevard was the route I needed, looping around the side of Hillsborough Bay, and then across Gandy Boulevard to the destination. When I finally neared the place, however, the street numbering was all wrong — evidently there are two roads with the same name, divided by a park — and by the time I finally reached Antle’s apartment, I was in a manic rage. It was past 2 o’clock in the afternoon by then, and I still hadn’t even gotten inside the convention, so after a screaming fit, I grabbed the credentials and rushed back to the car, racing to the Civic Center.

That nightmarish August afternoon in Tampa came to mind unexpectedly last night when, checking for the latest news on the Petraeus scandal, I scanned an article and saw a familiar address that figures prominently in my column today at The American Spectator:

Tampa’s Bayshore Boulevard is in the news today because it is the home of Jill Kelley, who played a crucial role in the scandal that brought down CIA Director David Petraeus.
Mrs. Kelley’s complaint to the FBI about threatening e-mails she received in May led to an investigation that exposed an affair between Petraeus, the retired four-star general who had been top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, and his biographer, Paula Broadwell. In recent days, a Tampa TV station reported, Mrs. Kelley has repeatedly called police seeking protection, at one point invoking her status as “honorary consul general.” She has been described as an unofficial “social liaison” at nearby MacDill Air Force Base, and now the media are encamped in front of the home that Mrs. Kelley shares with her surgeon husband, Dr. Scott Kelley, and their three children.
So far as we know, the Kelleys have done nothing wrong and were innocently drawn into this scandal because of the mistaken jealousy of Broadwell, a married mother of two who admittedly carried on an adulterous affair with Petraeus, who is likewise married. However, the FBI is now reportedly examining thousands of “potentially inappropriate” e-mails between Mrs. Kelley and Marine Gen. John Allen, who currently commands all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Even without any hanky-panky on Allen’s part — both he and Mrs. Kelley’s family strongly deny any such insinuation — there are still many intriguing questions swirling around this story. So the camera crews are likely to remain staked out on Bayshore Boulevard, while reporters, editors, and producers explore these questions, including the big one: How does this relate to the apparent failures in Libya that led to the death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens two months ago? . . .

Read the whole thing. The fact that I actually drove past Mrs. Kelley’s house less than three months ago is just a weird coincidence, I’m sure. Meanwhile, Petraeus will testify to Congress tomorrow.

PREVIOUSLY:

If You Were Saying to Yourself, ‘This Petraeus Scandal Isn’t Crazy Enough …’

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You’re going to love this news: Jill Kelley — whose report of threatening e-mails led to revelations of Gen. David Petraeus’s affair with Paula Broadwell — has a “psychologically unstable” twin sister. And when the sister needed a reference in her child custody case, Petraeus provided it:

The four-star general’s letter to the court — written in the past two months — supported a motion to overturn a ruling made nearly a year earlier by a judge who resoundingly denied custody to Kelley’s sister, Natalie Khawam, because of serious reservations about her honesty and mental stability, court records show.
Petraeus wrote his letter amid a bitter divorce and custody battle between Khawam and Grayson Wolfe, a partner in a DC-based private venture firm.
The letter was filed in DC Superior Court, where the father of Khawam’s 4-year-old son filed for divorce three years ago, two sources said . . .
A judge in November 2011 gave Wolfe sole custody of the couple’s son after finding that Khawam, a lawyer, repeatedly lied under oath and filed bogus domestic-violence and child-abuse claims against her husband after their one-year marriage began crumbling in 2009.
That judge also found that Khawam routinely defied court orders to let the child see his dad and sent harassing e-mails to Wolfe’s friends and business partners that “excoriated Mr. Wolfe for being a horrible father and husband.”
The judge blasted Khawam for giving false evidence, and noted that a court-ordered shrink had found her domestic-violence allegations to be “part of an ever-expanding set of sensational accusations . . . that are so numerous, so extraordinary and [so] distorted that they defy any common-sense view of reality.”
The judge also noted that she “is a psychologically unstable person.”

Let’s pause here, dear reader.

Petraeus is one of the nation’s most decorated military officers. He commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and was recently made director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Yet here he is, immersing himself in a swirling cesspool of raw craziness:

  • An affair with his worshipful biographer.
  • Using a trick to hide e-mails to his mistress.
  • His “family friend” Jill Kelley exchanging thousands of potentially inappropriate e-mails with his successor in command in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John Allen.
  • Vouching for the good character of Jill’s crazy sister.

This looks a lot like a belated mid-life crisis, or else maybe Petraeus’s reputation as a responsible adult was more image than substance. Were there other affairs before Paula Broadwell? Are we supposed to believe that the general, having resisted temptation for more than three decades of married life, suddenly found himself confronted by the one woman no CIA director could possibly resist? Color me skeptical.

Mark Steyn called this the “missing piece of the puzzle,” and that was before we learned that Gen. Allen had also intervened on behalf of Jill Kelley’s crazy twin sister — you know, the divorceé who made up “an ever-expanding set of sensational accusations” against her ex.

Because that’s what four-star Marine generals do, y’know: Vouch for mental cases in custody battles. It’s right there between the “halls of Montezuma” and the “shores of Tripoli.” Tim Stanley of the London Daily Telegraph writes:

How does this comedy relate to the horror of Benghazi, when four American citizens were killed at the tail end of what increasingly looks like an intelligence operation gone bad? It testifies to the extraordinary incompetence at all levels of the federal security state.

What is really interesting, however, is that this lurid and tawdry soap opera may have accidentally turned up the best explanation for why the Obama administration lied through its teeth about the Benghazi attack, as Townhall’s Katie Pavlich observes:

It isn’t the affair itself that gives us more information, but the affair bringing attention to words spoken by Broadwell in Denver on October 26. She said the CIA was holding prisoners at the annex in Benghazi and Fox News has confirmed with another source this was the case.
This explains two things. The U.S. consulate in Benghazi was being repeatedly attacked because prisoners were being held and because President Obama signed an executive order in 2009 banning secret CIA prisons, they had to find an alternative story to cover-up what really happened, hence the YouTube video.

Wow. So if Broadwell was right — and obviously, she was in a position to know — then either (a) the Obama administration was secretly violating its own announced policy, or (b) some in the CIA had gone “rogue,” and the deliberate obfuscation of what happened in Benghazi was a cover-up of this secret violation of the president’s executive order.

If so, then it bears a resemblance to the Iran-Contra scandal, and if it turns out that things went wrong in Benghazi because the folks in charge were too busy chasing poontang to do their actual jobs, then this story is a long way from being over.

Fausta’s right: Focus, focus focus.