Hillary Clinton's Aide Doesn't Know What 'Wiping' a Server Means Either

Hillary Clinton's stonewalling of Congress and FOIA requests, aided by the State Department,  in regards to the debacle at Benghazi, Libya  are almost outdone by her outright lies in regards to her personal, private email server. Hillary's claims that she has turned over all her work related emails have been proven to be lies and her claims that there was no classified information on her homebrew server have also been proven to be flalse .  What can top so many lies ? Continuing to pretend to not know what "wiping" the email server means.

Other blogs about the Hillary Clinton and State Department email scandal.:

Dozens of Hillary Clinton Emails Were Classified from the Start, U.S. Rules Suggest 
State Dept. Suddenly Discovers Thousands of Emails from Top Clinton Aide
Hillary Clinton Will Turn Over Email Server to Justice Department
Hillary Clinton's Email Server Answers Avoid Key Questions 
Data in Hillary Clinton’s ‘Secret’ Emails Came from 5 Intelligence Agencies 
Hillary Clinton Email Scandal - Obfuscation & Obstruction 
Hillary Clinton Denies Being Subpoenaed: Investigators Release Subpoena
Hillary Clinton Email Scandal - Obfuscation & Obstruction
@AP 's FOIA Request Shows Extent of Hillary Clinton's Email Coverup 
A blog on the Benghazi - Syria connection
Obama Arms the Syrian Rebels & 'Overlooks' Their Use of Chemical Weapons 
A blog on the first days of media 'coverage'
Obama Media Machine in Full Deflection Mode after Embassy Attacks 

ISIS Chemical Weapons Attack in Syria Exposes the Obama Administration's Deceit & Failure

More bad news for Barack Obama, his administration and the Democrats today.  More events in Syria tarnish Obama's already failed foreign policy 'legacy'. A legacy of deception, appeasement, weakness and failure.

Officials confirm ISIS used mustard agent in Syria

If the origins of the mustard gas is from Syria, it is just another example of the failure of Obama's chemical weapons agreement with Syria. If the origins of the mustard gas is from Iraq, it is just another example of WMD that were in Iraq. If it was just an improvised weapon, then it highlights the fact that the Obama administration also aided ISIS to fight Assad in Syria by moving arms from Benghazi,  Libya through Turkey to their destination in Syria. This chemical weapon attack by ISIS in Syria  was bad news, especially for Obama and the Democrats.  

U.S. Intel Officials Suspect Syria's Assad Retained Chemical Weapons

John Kerry 'Absolutely Certain' Assad Using Chlorine Attacks on his People

Democrats & The Iraq War: WMDs & the Surge

Barack Obama's Illegal Covert War in Syria

Obama Arms the Syrian Rebels & 'Overlooks' Their Use of Chemical Weapons

Obama Arms the Syrian Rebels & 'Overlooks' Their Use of Chemical Weapons

The chemical weapons that were used on civilians in Syria and Barack Obama's red line almost forced the west into another war in the Mideast.  Arming the Syrian Rebels is the Obama Administration's version of 'Iran Contra' mixed with the worst elements of the second Iraq war.   This story, however, will be not be covered by the main stream media, just like the other Obama scandals like Fast and Furious.

Seymour Hersh's new book provides behind the scenes details that connects the attack on the U.S. special mission in Benghazi, Libya to Turkey as an arms conduit for the Syrian rebels.  The same Syrian rebels who are responsible for the sarin chemical attack that the Obama Administration falsely blamed on Assad and the Syrian Government.

The Red Line and the Rat Line
Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.​＊ Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous. 

Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack. 

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’ 

The joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s public claims that only the Syrian army had access to sarin were wrong. The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has long known that al-Qaida experimented with chemical weapons, and has a video of one of its gas experiments with dogs.) The DIA paper went on: ‘Previous IC [intelligence community] focus had been almost entirely on Syrian CW [chemical weapons] stockpiles; now we see ANF attempting to make its own CW … Al-Nusrah Front’s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads us to assess the group’s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the future.’ The paper drew on classified intelligence from numerous agencies: ‘Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators,’ it said, ‘were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.’ (Asked about the DIA paper, a spokesperson for the director of national intelligence said: ‘No such paper was ever requested or produced by intelligence community analysts.’) 

Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction of mortars, and chemical precursors for sarin. Five of those arrested were freed after a brief detention. The others, including the ringleader, Haytham Qassab, for whom the prosecutor requested a prison sentence of 25 years, were released pending trial. In the meantime the Turkish press has been rife with speculation that the Erdoğan administration has been covering up the extent of its involvement with the rebels. In a news conference last summer, Aydin Sezgin, Turkey’s ambassador to Moscow, dismissed the arrests and claimed to reporters that the recovered ‘sarin’ was merely ‘anti-freeze’. 

The DIA paper took the arrests as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding its access to chemical weapons. It said Qassab had ‘self-identified’ as a member of al-Nusra, and that he was directly connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the ‘ANF emir for military manufacturing’. Qassab and his associate Khalid Ousta worked with Halit Unalkaya, an employee of a Turkish firm called Zirve Export, who provided ‘price quotes for bulk quantities of sarin precursors’. Abd-al-Ghani’s plan was for two associates to ‘perfect a process for making sarin, then go to Syria to train others to begin large scale production at an unidentified lab in Syria’. The DIA paper said that one of his operatives had purchased a precursor on the ‘Baghdad chemical market’, which ‘has supported at least seven CW efforts since 2004’. 

A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’ 

In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons.

The former intelligence official said that many in the US national security establishment had long been troubled by the president’s red line: ‘The joint chiefs asked the White House, “What does red line mean? How does that translate into military orders? Troops on the ground? Massive strike? Limited strike?” They tasked military intelligence to study how we could carry out the threat. They learned nothing more about the president’s reasoning.’ 

In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings. 

Britain and France were both to play a part. On 29 August, the day Parliament voted against Cameron’s bid to join the intervention, the Guardian reported that he had already ordered six RAF Typhoon fighter jets to be deployed to Cyprus, and had volunteered a submarine capable of launching Tomahawk missiles. The French air force – a crucial player in the 2011 strikes on Libya – was deeply committed, according to an account in Le Nouvel Observateur; François Hollande had ordered several Rafale fighter-bombers to join the American assault. Their targets were reported to be in western Syria. 

By the last days of August the president had given the Joint Chiefs a fixed deadline for the launch. ‘H hour was to begin no later than Monday morning [2 September], a massive assault to neutralise Assad,’ the former intelligence official said. So it was a surprise to many when during a speech in the White House Rose Garden on 31 August Obama said that the attack would be put on hold, and he would turn to Congress and put it to a vote. 

At this stage, Obama’s premise – that only the Syrian army was capable of deploying sarin – was unravelling. Within a few days of the 21 August attack, the former intelligence official told me, Russian military intelligence operatives had recovered samples of the chemical agent from Ghouta. They analysed it and passed it on to British military intelligence; this was the material sent to Porton Down. (A spokesperson for Porton Down said: ‘Many of the samples analysed in the UK tested positive for the nerve agent sarin.’ MI6 said that it doesn’t comment on intelligence matters.) 

The former intelligence official said the Russian who delivered the sample to the UK was ‘a good source – someone with access, knowledge and a record of being trustworthy’. After the first reported uses of chemical weapons in Syria last year, American and allied intelligence agencies ‘made an effort to find the answer as to what if anything, was used – and its source’, the former intelligence official said. ‘We use data exchanged as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The DIA’s baseline consisted of knowing the composition of each batch of Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons. But we didn’t know which batches the Assad government currently had in its arsenal. Within days of the Damascus incident we asked a source in the Syrian government to give us a list of the batches the government currently had. This is why we could confirm the difference so quickly.’ 

The process hadn’t worked as smoothly in the spring, the former intelligence official said, because the studies done by Western intelligence ‘were inconclusive as to the type of gas it was. The word “sarin” didn’t come up. There was a great deal of discussion about this, but since no one could conclude what gas it was, you could not say that Assad had crossed the president’s red line.’ By 21 August, the former intelligence official went on, ‘the Syrian opposition clearly had learned from this and announced that “sarin” from the Syrian army had been used, before any analysis could be made, and the press and White House jumped at it. Since it now was sarin, “It had to be Assad.”’ 

The UK defence staff who relayed the Porton Down findings to the joint chiefs were sending the Americans a message, the former intelligence official said: ‘We’re being set up here.’ (This account made sense of a terse message a senior official in the CIA sent in late August: ‘It was not the result of the current regime. UK & US know this.’) By then the attack was a few days away and American, British and French planes, ships and submarines were at the ready.
The officer ultimately responsible for the planning and execution of the attack was General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs. From the beginning of the crisis, the former intelligence official said, the joint chiefs had been sceptical of the administration’s argument that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad’s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the war,’ the former intelligence official said. Dempsey had irritated many in the Obama administration by repeatedly warning Congress over the summer of the danger of American military involvement in Syria. Last April, after an optimistic assessment of rebel progress by the secretary of state, John Kerry, in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘there’s a risk that this conflict has become stalemated.’ 

Dempsey’s initial view after 21 August was that a US strike on Syria – under the assumption that the Assad government was responsible for the sarin attack – would be a military blunder, the former intelligence official said. The Porton Down report caused the joint chiefs to go to the president with a more serious worry: that the attack sought by the White House would be an unjustified act of aggression. It was the joint chiefs who led Obama to change course. The official White House explanation for the turnabout – the story the press corps told – was that the president, during a walk in the Rose Garden with Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, suddenly decided to seek approval for the strike from a bitterly divided Congress with which he’d been in conflict for years. The former Defense Department official told me that the White House provided a different explanation to members of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon: the bombing had been called off because there was intelligence ‘that the Middle East would go up in smoke’ if it was carried out. 

The president’s decision to go to Congress was initially seen by senior aides in the White House, the former intelligence official said, as a replay of George W. Bush’s gambit in the autumn of 2002 before the invasion of Iraq: ‘When it became clear that there were no WMD in Iraq, Congress, which had endorsed the Iraqi war, and the White House both shared the blame and repeatedly cited faulty intelligence. If the current Congress were to vote to endorse the strike, the White House could again have it both ways – wallop Syria with a massive attack and validate the president’s red line commitment, while also being able to share the blame with Congress if it came out that the Syrian military wasn’t behind the attack.’ The turnabout came as a surprise even to the Democratic leadership in Congress. In September the Wall Street Journal reported that three days before his Rose Garden speech Obama had telephoned Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, ‘to talk through the options’. She later told colleagues, according to the Journal, that she hadn’t asked the president to put the bombing to a congressional vote. 

Obama’s move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end. ‘Congress was not going to let this go by,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Congress made it known that, unlike the authorisation for the Iraq war, there would be substantive hearings.’ At this point, there was a sense of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence official said. ‘And so out comes Plan B. Call off the bombing strike and Assad would agree to unilaterally sign the chemical warfare treaty and agree to the destruction of all of chemical weapons under UN supervision.’ At a press conference in London on 9 September, Kerry was still talking about intervention: ‘The risk of not acting is greater than the risk of acting.’ But when a reporter asked if there was anything Assad could do to stop the bombing, Kerry said: ‘Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week … But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.’ As the New York Times reported the next day, the Russian-brokered deal that emerged shortly afterwards had first been discussed by Obama and Putin in the summer of 2012. Although the strike plans were shelved, the administration didn’t change its public assessment of the justification for going to war. ‘There is zero tolerance at that level for the existence of error,’ the former intelligence official said of the senior officials in the White House. ‘They could not afford to say: “We were wrong.”’ (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The Assad regime, and only the Assad regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attack that took place on 21 August.’) 

*
The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida. (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The idea that the United States was providing weapons from Libya to anyone is false.’) 

In January, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault by a local militia in September 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others. The report’s criticism of the State Department for not providing adequate security at the consulate, and of the intelligence community for not alerting the US military to the presence of a CIA outpost in the area, received front-page coverage and revived animosities in Washington, with Republicans accusing Obama and Hillary Clinton of a cover-up. A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer. (A spokesperson for Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.) 

The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation. The former intelligence official explained that for years there has been a recognised exception in the law that permits the CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would otherwise be owed a finding. (All proposed CIA covert operations must be described in a written document, known as a ‘finding’, submitted to the senior leadership of Congress for approval.) Distribution of the annex was limited to the staff aides who wrote the report and to the eight ranking members of Congress – the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, and the Democratic and Republicans leaders on the House and Senate intelligence committees. This hardly constituted a genuine attempt at oversight: the eight leaders are not known to gather together to raise questions or discuss the secret information they receive.
The annex didn’t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi before the attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was attacked. ‘The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,’ the former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’ 

Washington abruptly ended the CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack on the consulate, but the rat line kept going. ‘The United States was no longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists,’ the former intelligence official said. Within weeks, as many as forty portable surface-to-air missile launchers, commonly known as manpads, were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter. ‘The Obama administration,’ Warrick wrote, ‘has steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such missiles, warning that the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and be used to shoot down commercial aircraft.’ Two Middle Eastern intelligence officials fingered Qatar as the source, and a former US intelligence analyst speculated that the manpads could have been obtained from Syrian military outposts overrun by the rebels. There was no indication that the rebels’ possession of manpads was likely the unintended consequence of a covert US programme that was no longer under US control. 

By the end of 2012, it was believed throughout the American intelligence community that the rebels were losing the war. ‘Erdoğan was pissed,’ the former intelligence official said, ‘and felt he was left hanging on the vine. It was his money and the cut-off was seen as a betrayal.’ In spring 2013 US intelligence learned that the Turkish government – through elements of the MIT, its national intelligence agency, and the Gendarmerie, a militarised law-enforcement organisation – was working directly with al-Nusra and its allies to develop a chemical warfare capability. ‘The MIT was running the political liaison with the rebels, and the Gendarmerie handled military logistics, on-the-scene advice and training – including training in chemical warfare,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Stepping up Turkey’s role in spring 2013 was seen as the key to its problems there. Erdoğan knew that if he stopped his support of the jihadists it would be all over. The Saudis could not support the war because of logistics – the distances involved and the difficulty of moving weapons and supplies. Erdoğan’s hope was to instigate an event that would force the US to cross the red line. But Obama didn’t respond in March and April.’

Read MORE from Seymour Hersh's Exclusive:

Previous Blog on Syria and Chemical Weapons
New Analysis of Rocket Used in Syria Chemical Attack Undercuts U.S. Claims

Article Critiques Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, Never Mentions Benghazi

 The following story runs at McClatchy about Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. The headline seems critical. Should I be surprised that Benghazi, Libya and the murder of our ambassador among the 4 Dead won't even be mentioned in the lengty article?

 Analysts: Hillary Clinton’s record as top U.S. diplomat falls far short of greatness

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/01/31/181652/analysts-hillary-clintons-record.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

By Hannah Allam | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — When Hillary Clinton joined the Obama administration’s famed “team of rivals,” political observers were abuzz with the possibilities of a secretary of state who was already a powerful global celebrity, a former first lady and a hardened presidential candidate.

Despite the star power and political savvy, however, analysts say four years later that they can’t identify an enduring diplomatic approach that would add her to the list of the all-time greatest secretaries of state.

Keep an eye on the media

Beyond Clinton’s far-reaching popularity and well-documented dedication to the job, there’s simply no standout moment or stance that would define her tenure, the analysts say. And there are important missteps involving Pakistan, Russia and Syria.
Steve Coll, a prize-winning investigative journalist and author who serves as the president of the New America Foundation research center in Washington, said a secretary of state should be judged on three main criteria: as a crisis manager, as the public face of an administration and as an innovator of ways to keep the State Department relevant in a digital world.
Coll said Clinton deserved high marks on the latter two, but that she was hamstrung on crisis management by a controlling White House that was singularly focused on a second term and therefore risk-averse when it came to foreign policy. When the administration finally did cede some ground, offering a bigger State Department role in Afghanistan, he said, the Pentagon was frustrated to find that the State Department simply didn’t have the capacity to deliver.

“While she was a very strong voice in the war Cabinet and decision-making on foreign policy, she was not an example of a secretary who wrote the president’s foreign policy, either by delegation or by force of will,” Coll said.
Clinton, often as polarizing as she is popular, is sure to face debates about her legacy long after Friday, when she ends her term and leaves the State Department to the incoming secretary, John Kerry, the veteran Democratic senator from Massachusetts. The topic is sure to come up if she enters the 2016 Democratic contest to succeed Obama.
Her supporters credit her with no small number of diplomatic feats. She worked tirelessly to bring attention to the rights of women and girls worldwide, calling such issues “the cause of my life.” She orchestrated a historic warming of relations with longtime pariah state Myanmar as part of a bolstered American presence in the Asia-Pacific region to counterbalance Chinese influence.
And wisely, analysts say, Clinton didn’t try to save allied Arab rulers from popular uprisings, although those revolts ended up presenting the thorniest policy questions of her time in office.

Fans also note that Clinton was a strong proponent of “digital diplomacy,” shaking up the calcified State Department by putting young people in charge of online initiatives and giving diplomats in the field unprecedented autonomy in social media. That move allowed the embassy in Cairo, for example, to publicly challenge the Muslim Brotherhood’s statements before thousands of followers on Twitter in a way that obviously wasn’t scripted in Washington.
Clinton also won praise for handling the public diplomacy surrounding the covert U.S. raid that killed terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. She was forthright once the mission came to light, analysts said, and firm in her defense of the decision not to tell the Pakistanis in advance.
Individually, such accomplishments are the fruits of a hardworking secretary who surrounded herself with smart advisers and held her own in Obama’s war Cabinet.
But taken as a whole, the successes just don’t add up to an overarching doctrine that will shape the department for years to come.

“Even an admirer, such as myself, must acknowledge that few big problems were solved on her watch, few big victories achieved,” Michael O’Hanlon, a defense and foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution research center, wrote in a recent assessment.
Clinton’s performance, he said, doesn’t compare with Henry Kissinger’s work on the opening to China, George Kennan’s containment policy or even the successes of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan in their stints as president. O’Hanlon added that Clinton has “one of the most solid track records of any modern secretary of state. But you do not yet have a historic legacy.”

Clinton suffered her share of embarrassments, missteps and outright policy failures, first and foremost in the Middle East, but also in other parts of the world.
Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert and assistant professor at Georgetown University in Washington, gave kudos to Clinton for her role in the bin Laden raid and for being among the first U.S. officials to publicly call out Pakistan for supporting militant groups.
However, Fair said, Clinton also made some “vexing and appalling” decisions in her Central Asia policy, such as refusing to apologize for a U.S. airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers or “throwing Cameron Munter under the bus,” a reference to the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan who went into early retirement after a public fallout with Washington over the intensity of the administration’s drone program.
Even worse, Fair said, was Clinton’s finding in March 2011 that Pakistan was in compliance with five criteria – such as uprooting al Qaida and cracking down on terrorism financing – that made the country eligible for continued U.S. security assistance. Fair said that any close observer of the region would know that the opposite was true – that Pakistan was quietly fueling the Taliban insurgency.
“They thought they could win in Afghanistan by placating the Pakistanis. And the Pakistanis, of course, are driving the Taliban,” Fair said.

Another embarrassment was the collapse of the administration’s much-touted “Russia reset,” which was designed to warm relations with Moscow but instead has seen the Russian government terminate three bilateral agreements with the United States in the past year. The most-publicized rupture was Moscow’s decision to stop American families from adopting Russian orphans, a huge blow to up to 1,000 families that were already waiting for children.
The chilly relations with Russia have only made it harder to reach an agreement on a political solution to the bloody Syrian civil war, which was one of many unintended consequences of the Arab Spring uprisings that have bedeviled Clinton for the past two years.
Some of Clinton’s stances that were praised initially were later cause for hand-wringing, most notably the U.S. support for NATO’s military intervention in Libya, which some claim saved thousands of lives, but which also ended up giving wide berth to extremists and causing a ripple effect that includes the current French-led war on Islamist militants in northern Mali.

Analysts say Syria represents a far more egregious U.S. policy failure.
The bloodshed is just shy of the two-year mark, and many are turning against the United States for its reluctance to give rebels the direct military assistance they claim could’ve spared countless lives by hastening the fall of Bashar Assad’s regime.
The bigger problem is that Clinton didn’t use her stature in the administration to push back against the national security specialists who’ve dominated foreign policy crafting for years, said Leila Hilal, the head of the Middle East Task Force for the New American Foundation research center.
She and other analysts described Clinton and her team of “liberal interventionists” as bigger risk-takers than the defense community, which was pushing a more hands-off approach to the Arab Spring conflicts, especially for Syria.

“She didn’t take on how national security dominates policy toward the region,” Hilal said. “She ended up concentrating more on women’s and girls’ programs and other initiatives instead of trying to pull back more power for the State Department.”
The Obama administration, after seeming to encourage the anti-Assad revolt, left building Syria’s rebels to Persian Gulf allies, and soon Saudis and Qataris were arming allies of the Muslim Brotherhood and, more disturbingly, al Qaida-linked Islamist extremists.
One of those groups, the Nusra Front, performed extraordinarily well on the battlefield and soared in popularity, creating yet another Syria policy conundrum for Clinton’s State Department: how to support Syrian rebels when the most skilled among them turned out to be jihadists.

The State Department decided the answer was to blacklist Nusra by declaring it part of al Qaida in Iraq, a designation that only rallied support for the fighters among Syrians, who charged that the United States had no right to decide the makeup of rebel forces when it was refusing to help in the fight.
“At the end of the day, if you’re going to align with the opposition against a brutal dictatorship, and then do little to ensure that the opposition succeeds, then you should stop talking about the righteousness of the cause,” said Coll, the journalist and author

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 No mention of Benghazi. The left wing media runs cover for EVERY democrat and their LIES. Power and Legacies must be protected. 


The Benghazi Hearing was a whitewash. The obvious questions were never asked or answered.

Main Stream Media Complicit in Obama's Libya Coverup

Barack Obama Lies about Benghazi Libya WITH the Main Stream Media's Help

Bias NOT Debatable - Candy Crowley Backs Obama's Libya Spin

The Leftist media has had their hands full trying to spin Obama's statements to reflect reality or the truth. During the Debate on 10/16/2012  the moderator wrongly backs Obama's statement that Benghazi was a terror attack,  ruining Mitt Romney's debate momentum and attempting to hurt his credibility. First, Candy Crowley talking to David Axelrod on Sept 30  Crowley to Axelrod: Obama Never Said Benghazi Attack Was 'Act of Terror'   Here is Candy Crowley just after the debate talking about Libya and that moment......


 CNN's Candy Crowley on moderating second presidential debate

Clip.....

O'BRIEN: Very, very interesting, I though. You told everybody at the beginning there's no clapping, turn off your BlackBerrys, turn off your cell phones. There was a moment when people clapped. Actually sort of two moments under the same question, which is about Libya. They were just talking about it, Wolf and Anderson, just a moment ago. And it was when the president said that he stood in the Rose Garden and said this was an act of terror, and the actually quote that he said on that day, the day after the act was, "no acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation," and went on from there.

In a way you had to fact-check on both sides.

CROWLEY: Right. Well, I knew that the president has said act of terror, because this has kind of come up before, and also I heard him that day. And what Mitt Romney was going for, and I think where he tripped himself up was that he picked that one wrong fact. The president did call it or refer to it in some ways an act of terror, and so it felt as though - and the president kept looking at me going, you know, and I thought, well, I did know then, I said, you know, he did call it an act of terror. That's what caused the applause.

O'BRIEN: But then this side over here –

CROWLEY: Right. On this side over here, which is clearly the –

O'BRIEN: Then you fact-checked again.

CROWLEY: And then I said, but you are correct that they didn't know for a couple of weeks that it wasn't related to the tape and there was no riot outside the consulate, so - and that side of the room clapped.

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 Did Barack Obama call it an 'act of terror' ?   No. he called it an attack and 9/11 an act of terror. The Media uses any words but  'act of terror' in the same segment in regards to his statement. The MSM immediately pushed the youtube video protest MEME from the 'disavowed' Embassy Statement.  The LEFTISTS are rewriting history in real-time to cover for the Obama Administration. 

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Barack Obama's Statement:

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

September 12, 2012

Remarks by the President on the Deaths of U.S. Embassy Staff in Libya

Rose Garden

10:43 A.M. EDT

Top part of speech edited..... the rest should show context of the remarks in question   ......

Along with his colleagues, Chris died in a country that is still striving to emerge from the recent experience of war. Today, the loss of these four Americans is fresh, but our memories of them linger on.  I have no doubt that their legacy will live on through the work that they did far from our shores and in the hearts of those who love them back home.

Of course, yesterday was already a painful day for our nation as we marked the solemn memory of the 9/11 attacks.  We mourned with the families who were lost on that day.  I visited the graves of troops who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hallowed grounds of Arlington Cemetery, and had the opportunity to say thank you and visit some of our wounded warriors at Walter Reed.  And then last night, we learned the news of this attack in Benghazi.
As Americans, let us never, ever forget that our freedom is only sustained because there are people who are willing to fight for it, to stand up for it, and in some cases, lay down their lives for it.  Our country is only as strong as the character of our people and the service of those both civilian and military who represent us around the globe.
No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.  Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America.  We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act.  And make no mistake, justice will be done.
But we also know that the lives these Americans led stand in stark contrast to those of their attackers.  These four Americans stood up for freedom and human dignity.  They should give every American great pride in the country that they served, and the hope that our flag represents to people around the globe who also yearn to live in freedom and with dignity.
We grieve with their families, but let us carry on their memory, and let us continue their work of seeking a stronger America and a better world for all of our children.
Thank you.  May God bless the memory of those we lost and may God bless the United States of America.
END
10:48 A.M. EDT
   Remarks by the President on the Deaths of U.S. Embassy Staff in Libya

====================================================================
The 10/16/2012 Debate- Candy Crowley in the Tank for Obama

Group says Obama’s Benghazi claim contradicted by Carney

The 'objective' moderator and the MSM failed the debates at many levels, just like Obama. Maybe that fact won't be lost to the viewers of the debate this time. Then it will be more than a victory for Mitt Romney, it will be a victory for TRUTH.

No, Obama Didn’t Call Benghazi “Act of Terror” in Speech 


Act of Terror

Biased Media Coverage is a Danger to Us All

Biased Media Coverage is a Danger to Us All 


The subpar performance of the POTUS by almost any measure is concealed well by the Main Stream Media. However the collusion and collaboration between the democrat party and the leftist media cabal poses a danger to freedom and the Republic. The agenda funded and foisted on the general public over the airwaves, directly or indirectly funded by the largess of the BIG Government, pushing big government's designs. Designs formulated at tax exempt foundations  by progressives who permeate academia and policy making organizations.
 Cairo 9/11/2012


Let's take a look at the weeks before the Embassy attacks and what will we find? Let's compare that to the Main Stream Media response.

Why is Obama skipping more than half of his daily intelligence meetings?

By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: September 10

President Obama is touting his foreign policy experience on the campaign trail, but startling new statistics suggest that national security has not necessarily been the personal priority the president makes it out to be. It turns out that more than half the time, the commander in chief does not attend his daily intelligence meeting.... 

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 Sure, he must be a busy man leading the free world. Now we look at two weeks in his schedule. I skipped convention week.

 Impressive Schedule. Then you remove half of the daily briefings from the schedule and maybe  there was even time to meet with the leader of Israel, for example.



Obama's White House Schedule

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Watch More News Videos at ABC | 2012 Presidential Election | Entertainment & Celebrity News

Mitt Romney on 09/12/2012 Formal Statement

News a few hours later
 Deadly embassy attacks were days in the making 
 by Sara Lynch and Oren Dorell, USA TODAY 09/12/2012

CAIRO --" Days of planning and online promotion by hard-line Islamist leaders helped whip up the mobs that stormed the U.S. Embassy in Egypt and launched a deadly attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya that killed an ambassador and three others.

As the U.S. tightened security worldwide at embassies and Libya's president apologized for the attack, details emerged of how the violence began, according to experts who monitor Egyptian media.

Christopher Stevens, 52, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was killed, along with three other Americans, on Tuesday night when a mob of protesters and gunmen stormed the embassy in the eastern city of Benghazi.

The killings there followed demonstrations in front of Cairo's U.S. Embassy, where protesters tore down the U.S. flag and scaled the embassy's wall.

The protest was planned by Salafists well before news circulated of an objectionable video ridiculing Islam's prophet, Mohammed, said Eric Trager, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced Aug. 30 by Jamaa Islamiya, a State Department-designated terrorist group, to protest the ongoing imprisonment of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman. He is serving a life sentence in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center... "

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The questions and the dogged pursuit of truth has the Main Stream Media asking all the right questions. Yes, it is about Mitt Romney's response
 to the predetermined partisan attack questions of the left-wing propaganda machine. 

No questions for the president on why marines weren't guarding our ambassador and embassy  from a predetermined attack. No questions on his golf and campaign schedule, or the fact that over 70 percent of all casualties in Afghanistan have happened in under 4 years of Barack Obama.  The classified leaks will be forgotten. The fact that Barack Obama is DIRECTLY responsible for the democracy project in the mideast and the embrace of the spread of 'democracy'  that led to chaos is not the subject. 



The media has their Dear Leader to elect. 


More on the Romney False Attack MEME

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