Obama administration

Churches aid illegal invasion of US

Obama Administration deliberately facilitating the flood of illegal immigrants and churches are aiding the flow

South Texas church groups are working around the clock to shuttle what appears to be hundreds of illegal immigrants to housing facilities, benefiting the Obama administration in its deliberate plan to flood America with illegal aliens for political purposes.

Infowars reporters are on the ground in the Rio Grande Valley, the continental United States’ southernmost region, where children and parents from Central America are pouring by the thousands past the US-Mexico border with hopes the U.S. will soon grant them amnesty, which the Obama administration has practically done through selective enforcement of immigration laws.

While monitoring activity at a bus station in McAllen, Texas, Infowars witnessed several church group vans arriving throughout the day and being loaded to capacity with children (many of them without parents), before heading out to facilities nearby.

Illegal immigration by youth to the U.S. has increased over 1300% in the past three years, from 6,500 in 2011 to around 90,000 this year, and may more than double in 2015.

Efforts to house the undocumented immigrants come as agents with the Department of Homeland Security are reaching a breaking point, with one agent telling Infowars he believed the Obama Administration was deliberately facilitating the flow.

US media’s knee-jerk response to Putin leads to Berlin-Moscow axis

by Ilana Mercer

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When it comes to President Vladimir Putin, who enjoys an approval rate of 65 percent among Russians, the motto of the menagerie of morons that is the American media is ignorance über alles.

The energetic and reflexive demonization of a Russian leader – unparalleled during communism – against the backdrop of the Sochi Olympic Games and the conflagration in the Ukraine, is the handiwork of a conga-line of cretins, stateside, whose bombast comports with the boorishness of their pronouncements.

The “Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest,” one wag’s delicious description of broadcaster Bill O’Reilly, is not delimited by ideology. Instead, “wanton Putin bashing,” as scholar of Russian history Stephen Cohen attests, is the order of the day at the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, on and on.

As to “traditional journalistic standards”: In the service of their anti-Putin monomania, the U.S. Pussy Riot press and its approved phalanx of “experts” routinely omit “facts and context,” conflate “reporting with analysis,” and court conformity and unanimity at the cost of veracity and impartiality.

(Revered in the U.S., Pussy Riot is a punk rock Russian band of feminists, whose forté is breast-baring, defiling places of worship, punching the air while shrieking, “F–k you Putin,” and participating in public-orgy protests and other criminal acts.)

The “Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest,” fortunately, is not a feature of the nuanced and informed analysis available on the John Batchelor Show, where the scholarly host and his guest, professor Cohen, delve deeply into the region’s geopolitical dynamics.

Cohen, who tackled O’Reilly’s out-and-proud ignorance with aplomb, was slightly more flummoxed by that of MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. She blamed Putin for Ukraine having “spun into politician chaos.” To wit, Europe had offered Ukraine $800 million in aid. The Kremlin “outbid the West” to the tune of billions, but held back on the last installment because it wanted to see to which government Russian funds would ultimately be going. Although Putin has since released the remaining funds to Ukraine, Mitchell surmised that Putin had orchestrated recent events so as to compel Kiev to sell-out to the Kremlin.

Nonsense on stilts. If anything, Putin’s impetus would be to avert trouble in Ukraine during the Sochi Olympics. Add Putin to the list of people who do not control what unfolds in Kiev, belabors Cohen.

Contrary to America’s Democracy Alinskyites – media, academia, members of the Stupid and Evil Parties, State Department floozy Victoria Nuland (taped plotting to “midwife a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government”), John McMussolini – the Ukrainian People, not unlike the “American People,” are not one people. The country is riven – divided into Western and Eastern regions, respectively. The West has been seduced by EU membership; the East is culturally and historically enmeshed in Russia.

What we’re witnessing is a tale of two Ukraines.

As it stands, explains Cohen, Kiev has lost control over Western Ukraine. Moderate voices are being silenced. Armed provocateurs are inciting matters and undermining moderate leadership. Revolution is being fomented.

Ukraine is not a dictatorship, it is an anarchy.

As to the demands issued by Vice President Joe Biden that the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych withdraw forces from the Maidan, the site of the protests: “preposterous,” avers Cohen. The “occupation of government buildings in Kiev and in Western Ukraine, the hurling of firebombs at police and other violent assaults on law enforcement officers … all documented and even televised”: these would not be tolerated in any Western democracy.

Equally outrageous is the Obama administration’s improvised and impromptu demands that the same democratically elected president step down before elections are held next year. The rational solution to the chaos in Ukraine is to allow the parties to “chill out” and resolve to wait until the February elections, next year, whereupon a referendum question can be tagged to the ballot to help decide whether Ukraine should sign up with Europe or Russia. (Cohen advocates an either/or “democratic” decision; I say secession.)

Should cool heads fail to prevail in the negotiation of a political solution, the division of Ukraine is impending, with part of the country cleaving to Europe, the other to Russia.

The “struggle for Ukraine” is a chapter in a series of U.S.-orchestrated provocations, which began with the expansion of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) eastward to abut Russia’s borders – an expansion pursued by Clinton, Bush and Obama alike. It gathered momentum with the U.S.-backed attempts to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine into the North Atlantic alliance.

The next stage in goading the Russian Bear consisted in American-funded NGO political-action groups – many of them backed by George Soros – flooding Russia proper. (“Purple” in Iraq, Blue in Kuwait, Cotton in Uzbekistan, Grape in Moldova, “Orange” in the Ukraine, “Rose” in Georgia, “Tulip” in Kyrgizstan, “Cedar” in Lebanon, Jasmine in Tunisia, Green in Iran, still un-christened in Russia and Syria: Dig around and you’ll find American activists à la Alinsky behind these “color-coded,” plant-based revolutions, blessed and backed by Foggy Bottom.)

“A U.S.-NATO military outpost in Georgia and missile-defense installations near Russia” completed the provocation. “Whether this longstanding Washington-Brussels policy is wise or reckless, it – not Putin’s December financial offer to save Ukraine’s collapsing economy – is deceitful,” inveighs Cohen.

Also upon us is a second Cold War between the U.S. and Russia, which will see a close, bilateral collaboration between Berlin and Moscow – Putin and Angela Merkel enjoy a cozy and copacetic relationship and will likely work together to dominate Eurasia.

Having flouted America’s national interests and squandered Russian goodwill – the ignoramuses of the Beltway will have no place in this grand geopolitical realignment.

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‘Osama bin Laden story is one big lie’

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

It doesn’t take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist”.

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

Don’t even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends “so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would” – or the death of Osama bin Laden. “Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true,” he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an “independent” Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny. “The Pakistanis put out a report, don’t get me going on it. Let’s put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It’s a bullshit report,” he says hinting of revelations to come in his book.

The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.

“It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama],” he declares in an interview with the Guardian.

He is certain that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “changed the whole nature of the debate” about surveillance. Hersh says he and other journalists had written about surveillance, but Snowden was significant because he provided documentary evidence – although he is sceptical about whether the revelations will change the US government’s policy.

“Duncan Campbell [the British investigative journalist who broke the Zircon cover-up story], James Bamford [US journalist] and Julian Assange and me and the New Yorker, we’ve all written the notion there’s constant surveillance, but he [Snowden] produced a document and that changed the whole nature of the debate, it’s real now,” Hersh says.

“Editors love documents. Chicken-shit editors who wouldn’t touch stories like that, they love documents, so he changed the whole ball game,” he adds, before qualifying his remarks.

“But I don’t know if it’s going to mean anything in the long [run] because the polls I see in America – the president can still say to voters ‘al-Qaida, al-Qaida’ and the public will vote two to one for this kind of surveillance, which is so idiotic,” he says.

The 76-year-old Hersh is on full throttle, a whirlwind of amazing stories of how journalism used to be; how he exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, how he got the Abu Ghraib pictures of American soldiers brutalising Iraqi prisoners, and what he thinks of Edward Snowden.

He was hired by the New York Times to follow up the Watergate scandal and ended up hounding Nixon over Cambodia. Almost 30 years later, Hersh made global headlines all over again with his exposure of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

For students of journalism his message is put the miles and the hours in. He knew about Abu Ghraib five months before he could write about it, having been tipped off by a senior Iraqi army officer who risked his own life by coming out of Baghdad to Damascus to tell him how prisoners had been writing to their families asking them to come and kill them because they had been “despoiled”.

“I went five months looking for a document, because without a document, there’s nothing there, it doesn’t go anywhere.”

Hersh is adamant that Obama is worse than Bush.

“Do you think Obama’s been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for. What’s going on [with journalists]?” he asks.

“Like killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren’t we doing more? How does he justify it? What’s the intelligence? Why don’t we find out how good or bad this policy is? Why do newspapers constantly cite the two or three groups that monitor drone killings. Why don’t we do our own work?

“Our job is to find out ourselves.”

Asked what the solution is for the sorry state of journalism, Hersh says: “I’ll tell you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist.”

Hersh is currently on a break from reporting, working on a book which undoubtedly will make for uncomfortable reading for both Bush and Obama.

“The republic’s in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple.” And he implores journalists to do something about it. – The Guardian

US military confirms rebels had sarin

As part of the Obama administration’s repeated insistence – though without offering proof – that the recent sarin gas attack near Damascus was the work of the Assad regime, the administration has downplayed or denied the possibility that al-Qaida-linked Syrian rebels could produce deadly chemical weapons.

However, in a classified document just obtained by WND, the U.S. military confirms that sarin was confiscated earlier this year from members of the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, the most influential of the rebel Islamists fighting in Syria.

The document says sarin from al-Qaida in Iraq made its way into Turkey and that while some was seized, more could have been used in an attack last March on civilians and Syrian military soldiers in Aleppo.

The document, classified Secret/Noforn – “Not for foreign distribution” – came from the U.S. intelligence community’s National Ground Intelligence Center, or NGIC, and was made available to WND Tuesday.

It revealed that AQI had produced a “bench-scale” form of sarin in Iraq and then transferred it to Turkey.

A U.S. military source said there were a number of interrogations as well as some clan reports as part of what the document said were “50 general indicators to monitor progress and characterize the state of the ANF/AQI-associated Sarin chemical warfare agent developing effort.”

“This (document) depicts our assessment of the status of effort at its peak – primarily research and procurement activities – when disrupted in late May 2013 with the arrest of several key individuals in Iraq and Turkey,” the document said.

“Future reporting of indicators not previously observed would suggest that the effort continues to advance despite the arrests,” the NGIC document said.

The May 2013 seizure occurred when Turkish security forces discovered a two-kilogram cylinder with sarin gas while searching homes of Syrian militants from the al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra Front following their initial detention.

The sarin gas was found in the homes of suspected Syrian Islamic radicals detained in the southern provinces of Adana and Mersia.

Some 12 suspected members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested. At the time, they were described by Turkish special anti-terror forces as the “most aggressive and successful arm” of the Syrian rebels.

In the seizure, Turkish anti-terror police also found a cache of weapons, documents and digital data.

At the time of the arrest, the Russians called for a thorough investigation of the detained Syrian militants found in possession of sarin gas.

This seizure followed a chemical weapons attack in March on the Khan al-Assal area of rural Aleppo, Syria. In that attack, some 26 people and Syrian government forces were killed by what was determined to be sarin gas, delivered by a rocket attack.

The Syrian government called for an investigation by the United Nations. Damascus claimed al-Qaida fighters were behind the attack, also alleging that Turkey was involved.

“The rocket came from a place controlled by the terrorists and which is located close to the Turkish territory,” according to a statement from Damascus. “One can assume that the weapon came from Turkey.”

The report of the U.S. intelligence community’s NGIC reinforces a preliminary U.N. investigation of the attack in Aleppo which said the evidence pointed to Syrian rebels.

It also appears to bolster allegations in a 100-page report on an investigation turned over to the U.N. by Russia. The report concluded the Syrian rebels – not the Syrian government – had used the nerve agent sarin in the March chemical weapons attack in Aleppo.

While the contents of the report have yet to be released, sources tell WND the documentation indicates that deadly sarin poison gas was manufactured in a Sunni-controlled region of Iraq and then transported to Turkey for use by the Syrian opposition, whose ranks have swelled with members of al-Qaida and affiliated groups.

The NGIC depiction of the variety of sarin as “bench-scale” reinforces an analysis by terrorism experts that the recent findings on the chemical weapons attack of Aug. 21 on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, was “indeed a self-inflicted attack” by the Syrian opposition to provoke U.S. and military intervention in Syria.

A former director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, said a preliminary analysis of the sarin showed that it was of a “kitchen” variety and not military grade.

He questioned that the sarin was of a military variety, which accumulates around victims’ hair and loose clothing.

Because these molecules become detached and released with any movement, Bodansky said, “they would have thus killed or injured the first responders who touched the victims’ bodies without protective clothes … and masks.”

Various videos of the incident clearly show first responders going from patient to patient without protective clothing administering first aid to the victims. There were no reports of casualties among the first responders.

Meanwhile, an Italian former journalist and a Belgian researcher who were recently freed from their al-Nusra captives say they overheard their captors talking about their involvement in a deadly chemical attack “last month,” which would have been the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack.

The Italian, Domenico Quirico, and Belgian researcher Pierre Piccinin were released Monday after five months of captivity.

“The government of Bashar al-Assad did not use Sarin gas or other types of gas in the outskirts of Damascus,” Piccinin said.

He added that the militants said the rebels carried out the attack as a provocation to force the West to intervene militarily to oust the Assad regime.

Both men told a news conference they had no access to the outside world while they were held captive and knew nothing about the use of chemical weapons until they heard the discussion on Skype.

Now, a former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, Ray McGovern, similarly backs the claim that the Syrian rebels perpetrated the poison gas attack on Aug. 21

McGovern was one of a number of veteran intelligence professionals who recently signed a letter to Obama saying that Damascus wasn’t behind the Aug. 21 chemical attack.

The analysts, in an open letter to Obama, referred to a meeting a week before the Aug. 21 incident in which opposition military commanders ordered preparations for an “imminent escalation” due to a “war-changing development” that would be followed by the U.S.-led bombing of Syria. They said the growing body of evidence came mostly from sources affiliated with the Syrian opposition and its supporters.

Those reports, they said, revealed that canisters containing chemical agents were brought into a suburb of Damascus, where they were then opened. – WND

High-level US intel: Syrian government did not launch chemical weapons

Numerous American intelligence officials have questioned the Obama administration’s claims about Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Intelligence is being manipulated to justify war against Syria, they say, as it is clear that the Syrian rebels had access to chemical weapons too and have apparently used them in the recent past.

Associated Press reported last week:

An intercept of Syrian military officials discussing the strike was among low-level staff, with no direct evidence tying the attack back to an Assad insider or even a senior Syrian commander, the officials said.

So while Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that links between the attack and the Assad government are “undeniable,” U.S. intelligence officials are not so certain that the suspected chemical attack was carried out on Assad’s orders, or even completely sure it was carried out by government forces, the officials said.

Another possibility that officials would hope to rule out: that stocks had fallen out of the government’s control and were deployed by rebels in a callous and calculated attempt to draw the West into the war.

Reuters notes today:

With the United States threatening to attack Syria, U.S. and allied intelligence services are still trying to work out who ordered the poison gas attack on rebel-held neighborhoods near Damascus.

No direct link to President Bashar al-Assad or his inner circle has been publicly demonstrated, and some U.S. sources say intelligence experts are not sure whether the Syrian leader knew of the attack before it was launched or was only informed about it afterward.

Intelligence officers actually say that the rebels have likely carried out the August 21st attack.

The Daily Caller reports:

The Obama administration has selectively used intelligence to justify military strikes on Syria, former military officers with access to the original intelligence reports say, in a manner that goes far beyond what critics charged the Bush administration of doing in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.

According to these officers, who served in top positions in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and Jordan, a Syrian military communication intercepted by Israel’s famed Unit 8200 electronic intelligence outfit has been doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.

The doctored report was picked up on Israel’s Channel 2 TV on Aug. 24, then by Focus magazine in Germany, the Times of Israel, and eventually by The Cable in Washington, DC.

According to the doctored report, the chemical attack was carried out by the 155th Brigade of the 4th Armored Division of the Syrian Army, an elite unit commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother.

However, the original communication intercepted by Unit 8200 between a major in command of the rocket troops assigned to the 155th Brigade of the 4th Armored Division, and the general staff, shows just the opposite.

The general staff officer asked the major if he was responsible for the chemical weapons attack. From the tone of the conversation, it was clear that “the Syrian general staff were out of their minds with panic that an unauthorized strike had been launched by the 155th Brigade in express defiance of their instructions,” the former officers say.

According to the transcript of the original Unit 8200 report, the major “hotly denied firing any of his missiles” and invited the general staff to come and verify that all his weapons were present.

The report contains a note at the end that the major was interrogated by Syrian intelligence for three days, then returned to command of his unit. “All of his weapons were accounted for,” the report stated.

An Egyptian intelligence report describes a meeting in Turkey between military intelligence officials from Turkey and Qatar and Syrian rebels. One of the participants states, “there will be a game changing event on August 21st that will “bring the U.S. into a bombing campaign” against the Syrian regime.

The chemical weapons strike on Moudhamiya, an area under rebel control, took place on August 21. “Egyptian military intelligence insists it was a combined Turkish/Qatar/rebel false flag operation,” said a source familiar with the report.

[A “false flag” is a ploy for starting war which has been used by governments around the world for thousands of years.]

Agents provacateurs are as old as warfare itself. What better than a false flag attack, staged by al Qaeda and its al Nusra front allies in Syria, to drag the United States into a war?

And 12 very high-level former intelligence officials wrote the following memorandum to Obama today:

We regret to inform you that some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British intelligence officials also know this. In writing this brief report, we choose to assume that you have not been fully informed because your advisers decided to afford you the opportunity for what is commonly known as “plausible denial.”

There is a growing body of evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East — mostly affiliated with the Syrian opposition and its supporters — providing a strong circumstantial case that the August 21 chemical incident was a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters. The aim is reported to have been to create the kind of incident that would bring the United States into the war.

According to some reports, canisters containing chemical agent were brought into a suburb of Damascus, where they were then opened. Some people in the immediate vicinity died; others were injured.

We are unaware of any reliable evidence that a Syrian military rocket capable of carrying a chemical agent was fired into the area. In fact, we are aware of no reliable physical evidence to support the claim that this was a result of a strike by a Syrian military unit with expertise in chemical weapons.

In addition, we have learned that on August 13-14, 2013, Western-sponsored opposition forces in Turkey started advance preparations for a major, irregular military surge. Initial meetings between senior opposition military commanders and Qatari, Turkish and U.S. intelligence officials took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in Antakya, Hatay Province, now used as the command center and headquarters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors.

Senior opposition commanders who came from Istanbul pre-briefed the regional commanders on an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development,” which, in turn, would lead to a U.S.-led bombing of Syria.

At operations coordinating meetings at Antakya, attended by senior Turkish, Qatari and U.S. intelligence officials as well as senior commanders of the Syrian opposition, the Syrians were told that the bombing would start in a few days. Opposition leaders were ordered to prepare their forces quickly to exploit the U.S. bombing, march into Damascus, and remove the Bashar al-Assad government

The Qatari and Turkish intelligence officials assured the Syrian regional commanders that they would be provided with plenty of weapons for the coming offensive. And they were. A weapons distribution operation unprecedented in scope began in all opposition camps on August 21-23. The weapons were distributed from storehouses controlled by Qatari and Turkish intelligence under the tight supervision of U.S. intelligence officers.

This article was originally published at Washington’s Blog

White House ‘not familiar with Chris Lane murder’

Josh Earnest, principal deputy White House press secretary, said he was not familiar with the murder of Australian jogger Chris Lane during Wednesday’s White House briefing.

When asked by Fox News chief White House correspondent Ed Henry about the Chris Lane case, Earnest responded, “I’m not familiar with it, actually.”

Henry explained the case in brief to Earnest looking for reaction to the Oklahoma shooting death of Lane at the hands of “bored” African-American teens who thought it would be “fun” to kill somebody.

“This sounds like a pretty tragic case. I wouldn’t want to get ahead of the legal process here and it’s clear that law enforcement officials are involved and are investigating,” Earnest said. “But any act of violence is something that — the president I think himself has spoken pretty eloquently about violence in our communities and he stood at this podium a few weeks ago where he talked about his concern about the impact that violence is having on, in particular, young people in this country.”

Henry pressed Earnest, noting that the President spoke about slain teen Trayvon Martin in the Rose Garden and in the briefing room.

“Why hasn’t [the president] spoken out about this? In this case, you said there was a judicial proceeding. There was one in the Trayvon Martin case. He spoke out extensively on that one,” Henry said.

“There are some people in this room I don’t thing who would agree with you that the president spoke out extensively on it,” Earnest responded.

Henry reiterated his point explaining that the President did speak about the Martin case in response to a question prior to the trial and then spoke about it after the trial in the briefing room.

“He expressed his concerns about the impact of violence on communities across the country and he talked about a number of things that the government can do, but also a number of things that we can do in our communities, whether it’s parents, churches, and communities can do to try to address the impact of violence and whether there is more we can do to try to protect our children,” Earnest said. – Daily Caller

US global terror warning inconsistent with weak al Qaida

The Obama administration’s sweeping response to an alleged al Qaida plot – closing diplomatic posts in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia – suggests a terrorist organization that’s capable of striking virtually anywhere, not the one U.S. officials have depicted as a group that’s near defeat.

Counterterrorism analysts said Monday that the U.S. government’s global response to a threat emanating from Yemen, home to al Qaida’s most active affiliate, was at odds with how dismissive President Barack Obama was in a speech in May, when he said that “not every collection of thugs that labels themselves as al Qaida will pose a credible threat to the United States.”

That was only one of a series of public statements by Obama and his Cabinet members that played down the capabilities of al Qaida-linked groups. For at least the past two years, the administration has sought to reassure Americans that al Qaida is “on the run,” while counterterrorism experts were warning about the semiautonomous affiliates that have wreaked havoc in North Africa, Yemen, Iraq and Syria.

“The actions the administration is taking now are deeply inconsistent with the portrait of al Qaida strength the administration has been painting,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research institute.

U.S. officials have been secretive about what precise information led to the worldwide travel advisory and embassy closings, but a Yemeni official told McClatchy on Sunday that authorities had intercepted “clear orders” from al Qaida leader Ayman Zawahiri to Nasir al Wuhayshi, the head of the affiliate in Yemen, to carry out an attack.

On the campaign trail last fall, Obama touted the killing of Osama bin Laden during a covert U.S. raid in 2011 as a sign that, while the U.S. would have to maintain vigilance, “the truth, though, is that al Qaida is much weaker than it was when I came into office.” In his State of the Union address last February, the president called al Qaida “a shadow of its former self” and said the threat posed by its affiliates wouldn’t require large-scale U.S. military deployment.

In July 2011, Obama’s then newly appointed defense secretary, Leon Panetta, said he was “convinced in this capacity that we’re within reach of strategically defeating al Qaida.” – mcclatchydc.com

Obama hiding Benghazi survivors, changing their names

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) was on with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News on Thursday to discuss the Obama scandals.

This came after Jake Tapper at CNN broke the news that there were “dozens” of CIA operatives on the ground in Benghazi on 9-11 when the consulate came under attack and the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.

Gowdy told Greta the Obama Administration is hiding the survivors, dispersing them around the country, AND changing their names.

“Including changing names, creating aliases. Stop and think what things are most calculated to get at the truth? Talk to people with first-hand knowledge. What creates the appearance and perhaps the reality of a cover-up? Not letting us talk with people who have the most amount of information, dispersing them around the country and changing their names.”

And, at the same time Obama is hiding the survivors around the country he’s calling Benghazi a ‘phony’ scandal.

The U.S. special mission in Benghazi was used to coordinate arms shipments and other aid to the so-called rebels fighting in Libya and later in Syria.

The scandal has garnered media attention since Sen. Rand Paul asked outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the claims that involve Stinger missiles during hearings over the Benghazi affair.

Clinton claimed she did not know whether the U.S. special mission was involved in gun-running.

Security sources have reconfirmed the use of the Benghazi mission in aiding al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorist groups.

The slain U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens, played a central role in recruiting jihadists to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, according to Egyptian security officials.

In November, Middle Eastern security sources further described both the U.S. mission and nearby CIA annex in Benghazi as the main intelligence and planning center for U.S. aid to al-Qaida that was being coordinated with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Among the tasks performed inside the building was collaborating with certain countries on the recruitment of fighters – including jihadists – to target Assad’s regime, the security officials said. – gatewaypundit.com/WND