Benghazi – praag.org

The Paltrow of politics (minus looks & ethics)

Hillary Rodham Clinton has done some “conscious uncoupling” from reality. The term was disgorged by a celebrity, Gwyneth Paltrow, to announce a separation from her spouse. In the same breath, the actress bemoaned her gilded, glamorous life, and offended America’s military sacred cow by comparing the cyber-attacks she endures to the experience of war.

As heir to a political dynasty founded by a powerful man, Hillary has received millions of dollars to write books. Over the years, she and husband Bill Clinton have made hundreds of millions from both book deals and speaking engagements. Yet in a recent ABC interview, the former “First Housewife” complained about emerging from the White House not only “dead broke, but in debt”: “We had no money when we got there and we struggled to … piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.”

Another reality Hillary has worked to deconstruct is Benghazi. Hillary dare not admit that, by leveling Libya, Americans invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted at the U.S. mission in Benghazi had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any U.S. provocation, real or imagined, to expel those who “came, saw, and conquered.” Still less is the former secretary of state willing to cop to having left the post undefended. This scribe has long subscribed to the view that, at bottom, the woman who cracked the whip at Foggy Bottom had imagined she would run the Benghazi compound like a community center. How better to signal that the war on Libya, Hillary’s special project, was a smashing success?

In a fit of “estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids,” Hillary and two sisters in the Obama administration—“humanitarian hawks” Samantha Power, then a member of the president’s National Security Council, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice, then Ambassador to the United Nations—launched a “war of the womb” that left Libya in shambles.

All along, our globetrotting hegemon evinced little respect for regional powers and their right to handle their own affairs, in-house, so to speak. On behalf of the African Union, South African President Jacob Zuma had brokered a deal with Libya. By the Telegraph’s telling, the AU had “outlined a political solution to end the fighting in Libya based on an immediate end to attacks on civilians and a ceasefire which would be monitored by a credible international organization. The ceasefire would lead to a transitional period and culminate in elections.” Col. Muammar Gadhafi agreed. Judging from what befell Libya, Hillary and her harridans would have none of it. They refused to give peace a chance. War it was. The rest is history, as is Libya.

Who can forget Hillary Clinton’s blood-curdling cackle, “We came, we saw, he died!”, when tidings arrived of the actions of her thugs of choice in that country? Backed by American drones and French fighter jets above, the Libyan rebels to whom the U.S. had taken a shine intercepted Col. Gadhafi as he fled his hometown of Sirte, dragged him from his vehicle, and lynched him then and there. Hillary’s ululations were a perfect complement to the rebels’ harangues of “Allahu Akbar.”

The focus of Hillary’s next blood-inspired hoedown was to be Syria. She had wanted to arm rebel forces there. Obama objected. Or so she tells readers of her latest, I-did-it-my-way memoire. A story broken by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), almost 2 years back, implicated Hillary’s Syrian soul-mates in the massacre of over 90 Alawi and Shia villagers, “predominantly women and children.” “Rebel atrocities,” relayed National Review’s foreign correspondent, were “being repackaged in both Arab and Western media accounts as regime atrocities.” As president, count on Hillary to devise a creative casus belli for the “humanitarian” invasion she hankers for in Syria. For if she has learned anything from Benghazi, it is not that America ought to divest from democratizing the word, but that our country needs more Green-Zone fortresses everywhere.

Whether this strong-as-a-horse politician was concussed or cowering, in the waning days of 2012, we will never know. Mrs. Clinton was scheduled to testify in December “before the House of Representatives and Senate foreign affairs committees on a report on the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.” She was a no-show.

But on CNN, love is in the air. Viewers have expressed a belief that Hillary would restore the country to the Clinton years of peace and prosperity. Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998, as well as a Sudanese pharmaceutical company that turned out to be the main manufacturer of medicines and vaccinations in Sudan. And he strafed the Serbs in 1999. Stateside, Bill butchered 76 men, women and children in Texas. Alas, so long as Hillary steers clear of another Waco, and confines her murderous sprees to killing far-away people from high above—few boots on the ground—her countrymen will consider her a peacemaker.

While prosperity during the Clinton years was due less to Clinton-economics than to Reaganomics and a Republican Congress not yet completely comatose—in fairness, Bill does grasp something about prosperity. “This is good work,” he famously said about Mitt Romney’s much-maligned work at Bain Capital. Hillary, conversely, has no economic acumen. “There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries,” she grumbled at the Clinton Global Initiative, in 2012. According to economist George Reisman’s cogent analysis—and contra Mrs. Clinton’s crushing ignorance—“a highly productive and provident 1 percent provides the standard of living of a largely ignorant and ungrateful ninety-nine percent.” As for Obama’s putsch for a North-Korean style health care: Instead of aborting it, Hillary will guarantee that Obamacare reaches full-term gestation.

Another wily fox called Bill (O’Reilly) has defended Mrs. Clinton’s riches as capitalism’s reward for hard work. Not quite. Hillary has accrued wealth by using the predatory political process to wield power over others. Although she has pudding for brains, Gwyneth Paltrow, on the other hand, has made a living in the honest, productive, non-predatory and salutary ways of the free market. Paltrow’s affluence, unlike Hillary’s, is a reward for assets she peddles to people who choose to purchase them.

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Al Qaeda from Benghazi attack trains Jihadists for Syrian rebels

U.S. intelligence agencies earlier this month uncovered new evidence that al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Benghazi are training foreign jihadists to fight with Syria’s Islamist rebels, according to U.S. officials.

Ansar al-Sharia, the al Qaeda-affiliated militia that U.S. officials say orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound and a CIA facility in Benghazi, is running several training camps for jihadists in Benghazi and nearby Darnah, another port city further east, said officials who discussed some details of the camps on condition of anonymity.

The officials said the terror training camps have been in operation since at least May and are part of a network that funnels foreign fighters to Syrian rebel groups, including the Al-Nusra Front, the most organized of the Islamist rebel groups fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus.

The officials said the jihadist training is a clear indication that Ansar al-Sharia continues to conduct terrorist activities and is linked to jihadists in both Syria and North Africa.

Disclosure of the terror training camps also bolsters earlier intelligence assessments that Libya, following the death of Muammar Qaddafi, is now a focal point for al Qaeda terrorist activity in North Africa.

Information about the terrorist training camps in northeastern Libya was uncovered after the arrest of several jihadists near the port city of Darnah in early August.

Other information about the camps appeared online at jihadist social media outlets around the same time.

Two men identified as Tunisians disclosed the existence of the training camps in Benghazi after they were interrogated by a local militia group in northern Libya.

At the time of their arrest, the Tunisians stated that they were trained in small arms use and were on their way to join Syria rebels by traveling first to Benghazi, then Istanbul, and over land across Turkey and into northern Syria.

According to the officials, the Tunisians were arrested Aug. 3. Inside their car, the militia found six passports, an AK-47 assault rifle, and foreign currency. A total of four people traveling in the car, including two Libyans, clashed with guards at a security checkpoint at the time of the arrest.

One of the men said he was an associate of Ansar al-Sharia’s leader Sufian Ben Qumu, an al Qaeda terrorist released from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2007.

Details of the number of jihadist training camps and jihadists was not disclosed, but the officials said there are several training camps.

The Ansar al-Sharia Brigade in Benghazi was formed in early 2012 from several Islamist militias that fought during the 2011 revolution that ousted Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. The group was forced to relocate its operating bases based on local opposition to the group’s role in attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound.

Ansar al-Sharia is engaged in overt charitable activities and armed patrols in Benghazi, in addition to the covert terrorist training. The group has sought to play down its role in jihadist activities to avoid both the Libyan government and international scrutiny.

Ansar al-Sharia in Darnah was founded by former members of the terrorist Salim Martyrs Brigade and operates a base west of Darnah.

Libyan officials told Britain’s Arabic language newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat earlier this month that some type of covert U.S. military action was taken against al Qaeda bases in Darnah. However, Pentagon spokesmen said they had no information about such attack that reportedly took place Aug. 11.

U.S. intelligence agencies believe Libya has produced more jihadist rebels for the Syrian conflict than any other outside nation. Some 20 percent of foreign jihadists in Syria came from Libya and that several hundred are currently in the country.

Over 100 Libyans were reported killed in Syrian fighting for such rebel groups as Al-Nusra Front, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, Umma Brigade, Muhajirin Brigade, and Ahrar al-Sham, an Al-Nusra offshoot.

The jihadist training highlights the danger that Libya is becoming a breeding ground for al Qaeda terrorists. Officials said the weak central government in Tripoli has allowed Islamist militias to flourish, including in Benghazi and Darnah where the two factions Ansar al-Sharia groups operate.

The Ansar al-Sharia Brigade was blamed by U.S. officials for carrying out the deadly Benghazi terrorist attack Sept. 11.

The Obama administration sought to cover up the terrorist attack in the weeks before the presidential election by initially claiming the action was the result of a spontaneous demonstration triggered by an anti-Islamic Internet video.

Four Americans were killed in the attack, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.

A Pentagon report from August 2012 published by the Library of Congress stated that al Qaeda senior leaders and the group al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) “have sought to take advantage of the Libyan Revolution to recruit militants and to reinforce their operational capabilities in an attempt to create a safe haven and possibly to extend their area of operations to Libya.”

The report said al Qaeda is developing a “clandestine network” in Libya that could be used in the future to destabilize the government and offer logistical support for al Qaeda activities in the region.

The report said that AQIM has formed sleeper cells that “are probably connected to an al Qaeda underground network in Libya, likely as a way, primarily, to secure the supply of arms for its ongoing jihadist operations in Algeria and the Sahel.”

“The al Qaeda clandestine network is currently in an expansion phase, running training camps and media campaigns on social-media platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube,” the report said. “However it will likely continue to mask its presence under the umbrella of the Libyan Salafist movement, with which it shares a radical ideology and a general intent to implement sharia in Libya and elsewhere.”

To avoid attacks, Ansar al-Sharia in Libya “could be the new face of al Qaeda in Libya despite its leader’s denial.” – Washington Free Beacon

Libya claims 14 000 prisoners still on the run

Mandela and Gadaffi in better days... — Mandela and Gadaffi in better days…

Some 14 000 prisoners who escaped from various Libyan detention centres after the 2011 ousting of Muammar Gaddafi are still on the run, the interior minister said Monday.

Speaking less than three weeks after more than 1 200 detainees escaped during riots from a prison in the eastern city of Benghazi, Mohamed al-Cheikh told ministry officials the interior and justice ministries were “working together to get them back to prison so they can serve out their sentences”.

“No fewer than 14 000 former prisoners who were serving sentences including capital punishment and life are still totally free after fleeing from prison,” said Cheikh.

“This situation is one of Libya’s problems,” the official news agency Lana quoted him as saying.

Libya’s authorities have been struggling to reestablish law and order and form a professional police and army since the fall of Gaddafi.

On August 1, in the latest in a string of incidents, 18 prisoners escaped during an attack on a Libyan police vehicle taking them back to prison from a courthouse in the capital. The incident came less than a week after the Benghazi prison riot and jail break. In April, armed men attacked a convoy of prisoners near Tripoli, killing a detainee and wounding others.

The reports of escaped prisoners come in the wake of a recently uncovered American arms transfer to Al Kaida rebels in Syria which cost the lives of three US citizens, including ambassador Chris Stevens. – Sapa/AFP/prisonplanet.com

Benghazi: CIA sent missiles to jihadis

Despite evidence showing the Benghazi attack was staged by a State Department hired jihadist security outfit in connection with an arms transfer to al-Qaeda mercenaries in Syria, the US MSM is pretending it does not know what happened in Libya on September 11, 2012.

The corporate media has yet to point out that the Obama administration attempted to cover-up the real reason for the murder of ambassador Stevens – U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the State Department initially pointing to a lame anti-Muslim video – and has consistently downplayed the incident and characterized it as a non-event not requiring congressional investigation and the impeachment of President Obama.

A number of guests appearing on the Alex Jones Show following the attack have built an indisputable case that the CIA was shipping arms from U.S.-controlled facilities located at the U.S. mission in Benghazi to its mercenaries in Syria and the murder of ambassador Stevens was carried out by an al-Qaeda affiliated group as part of a turf war between the CIA and elements in the Pentagon.

In May, former government insider Steve Pieczenik explained how a Pentagon effort to derail a CIA operation may have occurred.

All the evidence points to the Pentagon doing nothing to stop the attack on the compound. Martin Dempsey, chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted during a Senate hearing in June that highly trained Special Forces were stationed a few hours away from Benghazi on the night of the attacks but were not deployed.

This contradicts comments made by Gregory Hicks, the former top U.S. diplomat in Benghazi, who told Congress in May that officials from Special Operations Command-Africa ordered the units to stand down.

In May, Infowars.com posted an article reporting the fact the Benghazi attack and the murder of ambassador Stevens had nothing to do with an absurd anti-Islam video, as the establishment media and the Obama administration insisted, but was directly connected to the shipment of arms from Libya to the mercenaries in Syria.

Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, appearing on the same show, alleged that Turkey partnered with the CIA to take down Bashar al-Assad in Syria and, hours before the compound was attacked and Stevens and others lost their lives, the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin met with the U.S. ambassador.

According to Egyptian security officials, Stevens was instrumental in recruiting jihadists for the CIA’s war in Syria and “served as a key contact with the Saudis to coordinate the recruitment by Saudi Arabia of Islamic fighters from North Africa and Libya. The jihadists were sent to Syria via Turkey to attack Assad’s forces,” writes Aaron Klein.

It has been widely reported that the Syrian mercenaries belong to the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

It was learned after the attack that the February 17th Martyrs Brigade was paid by the State Department to protect the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. The group had “clear al-Qaida sympathies, and had prominently displayed the al-Qaida flag on a Facebook page for months before the deadly attack,” Max Rosenthal reported for Newsmax in May. The February 17th Martyrs Brigade, it was latter learned during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, are in league with Ansar al-Sharia, said to be linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Part of the operation involving Stevens included sending surface-to-air missiles to al-Qaeda in Syria. “Speculation on Capitol Hill has included the possibility the U.S. agencies operating in Benghazi were secretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels,” CNN also reported late last week.

The Obama administration announced in late September that “it planned to expand a program to secure and destroy Libya’s huge stockpile of dangerous surface-to-air missiles” and that “the U.S. State Department has one official on the ground in Libya, as well as five contractors who specialize in ‘explosive ordinance disposal,’ all working with the rebel Transitional National Council to find the looted missiles,” ABC News reported.

In fact, the State Department, under the guidance of ambassador Stevens, was moving to round up the missiles and send them to al-Qaeda in Syria. Prior to this, in December, 2011, the U.S. claimed to have secured 5,000 surface-to-air missiles and destroyed them outside of the village of Sidi Bin Nur in Libya. Doubtless, instead, they became part of the CIA’s cache destined for Syria.

US shuts down embassies in Middle East

The United States will temporarily shut down its embassies and consulates around the world Sunday — including those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt — as a precautionary measure over terror-related concerns, State Department officials said.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf did not say how long the international installations would stay closed — only that the decision was taken “out of an abundance of caution and care for our employees and others who may be visiting.” Officials would not describe the nature of the threat.

Sunday is a normal workday in many Arab and Middle Eastern countries, meaning that is where the closures will have an impact. Embassies in Europe and Latin America would be shuttered that day anyway.

“We have instructed all U.S. embassies and consulates that would have normally been open on Sunday to suspend operations, specifically on August 4,” a senior State Department official said Thursday night. “It is possible we may have additional days of closing as well.”

Other U.S. officials said the threat was specifically in the Muslim world.

The issue of security abroad has been prominent since the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, and a string of demonstrations on other U.S. embassies in the Middle East and North Africa.

On Thursday, measures to beef up security at U.S. embassies were passed out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The bill is in response to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

The Senate bill creates a training center for diplomatic security personnel.

Separately, the House Foreign Affairs Committee authorized full security funding for diplomatic missions — despite recommending a nine percent cut overall for State Department operations.

The House and Senate have already approved spending bills that cover embassy security. But their budgets differ markedly in other areas. – foxnews.com

Why I am so sad

by Ilana Mercer

I AM SO SAD – and it is not because a justifiably angry crowd of Libyans in Benghazi stormed an embassy that represents the brute force that destabilized their lives for decades to come.

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any U.S. provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw and conquered.”

To those who imagine the death of our diplomats in Libya turns on American free-speech, I say this: You have no right to deliver your disquisition in my living room. You have only the right to request permission to so do from this (armed) private-property owner.

By extension, you have no universal right to “free speech” on another man’s land. More so than to America’s diplomats – Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran.

I AM SO SAD – and it is not because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen a most inopportune time to insert himself into the middle of a rancorous American election season and by so doing make Mitt Romney’s foreign-policy bellicosity look good to a war-weary people that can ill-afford it.

Now is not a good time, Bibi. Israel is a wedge issue in the coming election. If Israelis love Americans as Americans love Israel, they need to understand that, “The Titan is Tired”:

“We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own – be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.”

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

I AM SO SAD – and it is not because another 9/11 has come and gone. The polls indicate that Americans want to move on; have moved on. Perhaps Americans have realized that it behooves our “overlords who art in D.C.” to keep them stuck in grief. By stunning us like cattle to the slaughter, the statists have been able to perpetrate in our name crimes way worse than 9/11.

I AM SO SAD because my sweet, kind friend, Thomas Szasz, has passed away. Tributes merely touch on professor Szasz’ unmatched genius and attendant achievements (professor of psychiatry emeritus, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, N.Y., and author of the seminal work, “The Myth of Mental Illness”).

I attempted to word what Thomas Szasz did over decades, in the advance praise he requested for one of his many magisterial masterpieces, “Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry”:

“Bit by barbarous and bizarre bit, Thomas Szasz dismantles psychiatry’s rickety scaffolding, exposing over two centuries of physical torture and tortured logic. Professor Szasz takes the necessary analytical and empirical solvents to this state-empowered fraternity of sorceresses. He also supplies the only salve for the psychiatric violence he correctly dubs ‘psychiatric slavery’: abolition: Now, ‘Let the sunshine in.’”

“This will be hard to beat,” Tom quipped. (“Tom” was how he’d sign off.)

Allow me, then, to speak but briefly to the tender friendship professor Szasz and I developed over the years. Briefly, for the breezy ease with which my countrymen share their feelings with strangers is alien to me. Abreacting à la Oprah in public bespeaks a shallowness that was foreign to Tom too. Whenever we communicated, it was in succinct, intense and precise language. We spoke a similar language. Dare I say that it was our shared ancestry as European Jews that accounted for these cultural commonalities?

For example, we came together – yet stood apart from libertarian mainstream – on the all-time moral litmus test: the state-sanctioned, slow execution of Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo.

Even eerier was the way we both drew on the allegoric power of William Faulkner to capture the late Ms. Schiavo’s plight, before knowing one another. “A Rose for Emily” was Tom’s source of inspiration, in June of 2006; mine was “As She Lay Dying,” in March of 2005.

“Kindred souls” was Tom’s reaction.

Late in 2009, we decided to meet near Huntington Beach, where, Dr. Szasz, nearing 90, was to address a conference. Alas, he was detained on the East Coast by bad weather, and my husband and I went on to visit in the vicinity. “Maybe I’ll mobilize myself and visit you next summer in Seattle,” he promised.

I last heard from Dr. Szasz on July 27, this year. Characteristically, it was in response to a column I had written, “‘You didn’t build that’: Obama’s political epitaph.” As he would so often do, the great man excerpted his favorite lines. “BRAVO, AGAIN!,” he added in capitals.

I replied:

Thank you, my dear. It seems so futile.
But I like hearing from you.
How have you been?

Tom wrote back laconically but poignantly:

Yes. Disheartening. “Virtue is its own reward.” – I am OK.

Would that everyone rationed speech thus; the entire mainstream punditocracy would cease to exist.

Earlier this year – it was in May – I made my way to Manhattan, where it was my distinction to address Victor Niederhoffer’s New York City Junto gathering as featured speaker. I inquired whether Tom would be gallivanting around, as was his wont.

Ever sweet and affectionate, there was a finality to his reply:

Many thanks, dear Ilana. Sadly no. I am OK but progressively weakening and everything is too much of a schlep. I enjoy and agree with all that you send me.
Love (without a first sight), Tom.

“Promise me,” I wrote back, “that this will not be unrequited love.”

“It is NOT,” Tom replied.