Obama Admin Approved Arms For Libyan Rebels Ended Up Going to Militants

Evidence has surfaced that weapons approved by the Obama administration, for rebels in Libya, ended up in the hands of Islamic militants. C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments and within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, there were reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. Weapons were also shipped from the United Arab Emirates.

Qatar, a tiny nation whose natural gas reserves have made it enormously wealthy, for years has tried to expand its influence in the Arab world. Since 2011, with dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa coming under siege, Qatar has given arms and money to various opposition and militant groups, chiefly Sunni Islamists, in hopes of cementing alliances with the new governments.

“To do this right, you have to have on-the-ground intelligence and you have to have experience,” said Vali Nasr, a former State Department adviser. “If you rely on a country that doesn’t have those things, you are really flying blind. When you have an intermediary, you are going to lose control.”

Mahmoud Jibril, then the prime minister of the Libyan transitional government, expressed frustration to administration officials that the United States was allowing Qatar to arm extremist groups opposed to the new leadership, according to several anonymous American officials. The administration has never determined where all of the weapons went inside Libya, officials said.

Some of the machine guns, automatic rifles, and ammunition are believed to have gone to militants with ties to Al Qaeda in Mali while several American and foreign officials and arms traders say some of the weapons have ended up in Syria.

The United Arab Emirates first asked the Obama administration for permission to ship American built weapons, supplied to the UAE, during the early months of the Libyan uprising. The administration instead urged the emirates to ship weapons to Libya that could not be traced to the United States.

“The U.A.E. was asking for clearance to send U.S. weapons,” said one former official. “We told them it’s O.K. to ship other weapons.”

“Nobody knew exactly who they were,” said one former defense official. The Qataris are “supposedly good allies, but the Islamists they support are not in our interest.”

No evidence has yet surfaced that any weapons went to Ansar al-Shariah, an extremist group blamed for the Benghazi attack.

 

Under Obama Only 13% of Drone Strikes Killed Leaders of Taliban or Al Qaeda

Obama administration officials often speak about how drone strikes target suspected terrorists plotting against the U.S., but according to the New York Times the U.S. has shifted away from that. Instead, it now often targets enemies of allied governments in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan. From the Times:

[F]or at least two years in Pakistan, partly because of the C.I.A.’s success in decimating Al Qaeda’s top ranks, most strikes have been directed at militants whose main battle is with the Pakistani authorities or who fight with the Taliban against American troops in Afghanistan.

In Yemen, some strikes apparently launched by the United States killed militants who were preparing to attack Yemeni military forces. Some of those killed were wearing suicide vests, according to Yemeni news reports.

Justin Elliott of propublica.org conducted an interview with  Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations on the issue of the ever expanding U.S. drone war:

 

You were quoted over the weekend arguing that the U.S., with the campaign of drone strikes, is acting as the “counterinsurgency air force of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.” How did you come to this conclusion?

Under the Obama administration, officials have argued that the drone strikes are only hitting operational Al Qaeda leaders or people who posed significant and imminent threats to the U.S. homeland. If you actually look at the vast majority of people who have been targeted by the United States, that’s not who they are.

There are a couple pieces of data showing this. Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation has done estimates on who among those killed could be considered “militant leaders” — either of the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, or Al Qaeda. Under the Bush administration, about 30 percent of those killed could be considered militant leaders. Under Obama, that figure is only 13 percent.

Most of the people who are killed don’t have as their objective to strike the U.S. homeland. Most of the people who are killed by drones want to impose some degree of sharia law where they live, they want to fight a defensive jihad against security service and the central government, or they want to unseat what they perceive as an apostate regime that rules their country.

Why does this distinction matter so much?

This is a huge outstanding dilemma. Is the primary purpose of the drone attacks counter-terrorism, or is it counter-insurgency? If it’s counter-insurgency, that is a very different mission, and you have to rethink the justifications and rethink what the ultimate goal is of using lethal force.

There was a February article in the New York Times reporting that the goal of U.S. policy in Yemen was to kill about two dozen Al Qaeda leaders. There’s been about 50 drone strikes in Yemen since that article. Meanwhile, according to U.S. government statements, the size of AQAP has grown from “several hundred” to “a few thousand members.” So the question is, who is actually being targeted, and how does this further U.S. counterterrorism objectives?

Read more here.

Pentagon Admits to Not Having a Death Cert., Autopsy Report or DNA ID Test Result for Bin Laden

Newly released heavily redacted emails obtained by the Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act has shed new light on the May 1, 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in his secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The internal emails sent among U.S. military officers indicate that no sailors aboard the USS Carl Vinson witnessed Bin Laden’s burial at sea and that only a small group of the ship’s leadership was even informed of the event.

“Traditional procedures for Islamic burial was followed,” a May 2nd email from Rear Adm. Charles Gaouette reads. “The deceased’s body was washed (ablution) then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased’s body slid into the sea.”

The Obama administration promised to be one of, if not the most transparent administration ever but when it comes to details surrounding the killing of Bin Laden they have been incredibly secretive. In a response to separate requests from the AP for information about the mission, the Defense Department said in March that it could not locate any photographs or video taken during the raid or any pictures or video showing Bin Laden’s body. It also said it could not find any images of Bin Laden’s body on the Vinson. Meanwhile the Pentagon says it can not find any death certificate, autopsy report or results of DNA identification tests for Bin Laden, or even any pre-raid materials discussing government plans to dispose of Bin Laden’s body if he were killed.

The CIA, which ran the Bin Laden raid and has special legal authority to keep information from ever being made public, has not responded to the AP’s request for records about the mission.

So if you have any questions as to how the government could conduct a military assault on a secret compound, kill and bury at sea the most wanted terrorist on earth without any video or pictures taken during the raid or any pictures or video of his dead body being dumped in the ocean or any death certificate, autopsy report or evidence of DNA identification please keep them to yourself. Just trust your government. They would never lie to you, would they!?

 

Obama Administration Plans to Extend “War on Terror” For at Least Another Decade

For two years, the Obama administration has been secretly creating a new terrorist targeting list called the “disposition matrix.” The matrix contains the names of suspected terrorism suspects matched against the collective resources being used to pursue them, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists and the reach of American drone strikes. The conventional wars in the middle east may be winding down but there is broad consensus among senior Obama administration officials that these operations are likely to be extended at least another decade while some say there is no clear end in sight.

“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . .We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’ ”

The number of militants and civilians killed in drone strikes over the past 10 years will soon exceed 3,000 by various estimates, surpassing the number of people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan wants to codify the administration’s approach to generating capture/kill lists to guide future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced. CIA Director David H. Petraeus is pushing for an expansion of the agency’s fleet of armed drones. The proposal reflects the agency’s transformation into a paramilitary force.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has made it clear that if elected he would continue the drone campaign. “We can’t kill our way out of this,” he said, but added later that Obama was “right to up the usage” of drone strikes and that he would do the same.

 

We Are Change Educates Obama Supporters

Some people may say what Luke Rudkowski of wearechange.org does in the following video to some Obama supporters is deceitful but it definitely exposes the ugly truth about the American electorate, and that is that too many voters are simply not as informed as they think they are when it comes to the policies of the politicians they support.

 

Ex-CIA Chief Hayden Says Obama Followed Bush Lead on War on Terror, But With More Killing

Bush’s former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency says that President Barack Obama has closely followed the policy of his predecessor, President George W. Bush, when it comes to fighting the “war on terror” — from rendition, targeted killings, state secrets, Guantanamo Bay to domestic spying.

Hayden, who oversaw the CIA’s use of torture techniques against detainees and the expansion of the NSA to illegally spy on American citizens said he was initially skeptical of Obama. He also publicly criticized the administration for making the Bush-era legal memos that attempted to re-define torture as “enhanced interrogation techniques” available to the public.

In a nearly 80-minute lecture posted on C-Span, Hayden said Obama embraced Bush’s positions that the country was at war, the enemy was al-Qaida, the war was global in nature, and the United States would take the fight to the enemy, wherever it may be.

“And yet, you’ve had two presidents, the American Congress, and the American court system, in essence, sign up to all four of those sentences,” Hayden said.

Moments later, Hayden added:

“And so, we’ve seen all of these continuities between two very different human beings, President Bush and President Obama. We are at war, targeted killings have continued, in fact, if you look at the statistics, targeted killings have increased under Obama.”

A major difference though between Obama and Bush is that in 2009 Obama closed CIA “black sites” and ratcheted down on torturing detainees, but instead of capturing so-called “enemy combatants,” President Obama kills them.

Obama’s kill list has even included American citizens.

Hayden noted Obama campaigned on promises to close the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, and to bring more transparency to government, but has failed to close Gitmo and has continued to use the “state secrets” defense in court cases challenging the government’s policies on the war on terror.

“Despite a campaign that was based on a very powerful promise of transparency, President Obama, and again in my view quite correctly, has used the state secrets argument in a variety of courts, as much as President Bush,” Hayden said. He added that he appreciated Obama’s invocation of the state secrets privilege, as Hayden himself was named as a defendant in some of the cases.

Hayden also pointed out that in 08 as a State Senator, Obama voted to legalize President Bush’s once-secret warrantless spying program. The law authorizes the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mail without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed to be outside the United States. It also granted America’s telecoms immunity from lawsuits for their complicity in the spy program.

“The FISA Act not only legitimated almost every thing president Bush had told me to do under his Article II authorities as commander in chief, but in fact gave the National Security Agency a great deal more authority to do these kind of things,” Hayden said.

The law, now known as the FISA Amendments Act, expires at year’s end. The Obama administration said congressional reauthorization was the administration’s “top intelligence priority,” despite 2008 campaign promises to make the act more privacy-friendly.

Hayden, who said he was an adviser to the Romney presidential campaign, said Romney would largely follow Obama’s same path, too, if Romney was elected.

“If we’re looking forward,” Hayden said, “I actually suspect there is going to be some continuity between a President Romney and and his predecessor, too, if that came to pass.”

Obama Administration Denied Repeated Requests for Increased Security in Libya

 U.S. officials in Washington turned down repeated requests for increased security from American diplomats in Libya at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, where a U.S. ambassador was killed, despite two explosions and dozens of other security threats.

In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz said they have information from “individuals with direct knowledge of events in Libya” detailing multiple attacks on U.S. diplomats and officials  in Libya in the months before the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the U.S.

The letter listed 13 incidents, but Chaffetz said in an interview that there were actually more than 50. Two of them involved explosive devices: a June 6 blast that blew a hole in the security perimeter. The explosion was described to the committee as “big enough for 40 men to go through”; and an April 6 incident where two Libyans who were fired by a security contractor threw a small explosive device over the consulate fence.

“A number of people felt helpless in pushing back” against the decision not to increase security and “were pleading with them to reconsider,” Chaffetz said.

The State Department declined to answer questions about whether extra security was sought by officials in Benghazi ahead of the attack.

Clinton did send a letter to Issa stating that she has established an accountability review board that will determine “whether our security systems and procedures in Benghazi were adequate, whether those systems and procedures were properly implemented, and any lessons learned that may be relevant to our work around the world.” She also asked the committee to withhold any final conclusions about the Benghazi attack until the committee can review the findings of the board.

Clinton also pledged to address the specific questions raised in the committee’s letter in addition to document requests.

Referring to the Benghazi attack, the letter said, “It was clearly never, as administration officials once insisted, the result of a popular protest.”

The Obama administration insisted that the attacks on our embassies was a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islamic video circulating on the Internet. Since then, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and White House press secretary Jay Carney have called the incident a terrorist attack.

Other incidents cited in the Issa-Chaffetz letter to Clinton:

—Just weeks before the attacks, the unarmed Libyan guards at the consulate, employed by British contractor Blue Mountain Group, were warned by family members to quit their jobs because there were rumors of an impending attack.

—In April, a gun battle erupted about two miles from the consulate between an unidentified armed group and forces loyal to the transitional government.

—In June, a posting on a Facebook page mentioned Stevens’ early morning runs around Tripoli along with members of his security detail. The page contained a threat against Stevens and a stock photo of him. Stevens stopped the runs for about a week, but then resumed.

ABC News has obtained an e-mail detailing the Obama Administration’s denial of a request by US Diplomats in Libya for Security-Enhancing Transportation.

 

Ben Swann’s Reality Check: “Muslim Protests Have Nothing To Do With A Youtube Video?”

Ben Swann takes a look at the United Nations call for an international blasphemy law and the riots that were supposedly caused by the movie “The Innocence of Muslims”

 

Afghan Officials Say NATO strike Killed Women and Girls Gathering Firewood

Local officials in eastern Afghanistan say that a NATO airstrike supposedly targeting 45 armed insurgents, killed  killed eight women and girls. The alliance admits that some civilians may have been killed.

Laghman provincial government Sarhadi Zewak said the women were gathering firewood when they were hit by the strike. Seven other females were being treated in the hospital for injures, some as young as 10. Villagers carried the victims’ bodies to the local governor’s office while some chanted “Death to America!” said Zewak.

NATO initially reported that as many as 45 armed insurgents were killed in a “precision air strike,” but Major Adam Wojack, a spokesman for the Isaf later told the BBC that between five and eight civilians may have been caught in the crossfire in a “tragic loss of life.”

 

 

 

TSA Agent on Camera Admitting to Detaining Traveler for Having a Bad Attitude

Via YouTube user AirportVideosofTSA