By Melanie Phillips
Fort Hood, Benghazi, the Boston bombings,
Iran/Syria, Israel. The pattern is unmistakeable; the danger to America is
exponentially increasing; the scandal is deepening into something nearer to a
national crisis.
The Obama administration is playing down
the Islamist threat to the US and the free world, empowering Islamists at home
and abroad, endangering America and betraying its allies -- and covering up its
egregious failure to protect the homeland as a result of all the above, while
instead blaming America for its own victimisation.
What is coming out in the Benghazi
hearings would be jaw-dropping if it had not been apparent from the get-go that
the administration failed to protect its own people in the beseiged American
mission where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff were murdered in
2012, then lied about the fact that this was an Islamist attack, and then
covered up both its failure and its lie. (Apparent, that is, to some -- but not
to the American media, most of which gave the Obama administration a free pass
on the scandal in order to ensure the smooth re-election of The One).
But the administration has form on this
-- serious, continuing form. After the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, in which an
Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood,
Texas shouting ‘Allahu akhbar’, not only was it revealed that his
radicalisation and extremist links had been ignored but the Department of
Defense and federal law enforcement agencies classified the shootings merely as
an act of ‘workplace violence’.
Weeks after the Boston marathon terrorist
atrocity, there is still no explanation of why the FBI did not act against the
Tsarnaev brothers, despite having had one of them on their books as a dangerous
Islamic radical after a warning from Russian intelligence; and why, as the
House Homeland Security Committee heard yesterday, the FBI didn’t pass on their
suspicions about the brothers to the Boston police.
Even now, the US authorities are playing
down or even dismissing Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s extremist Islamic views.
Whether or not the brothers had links to foreign extremists is still unclear.
But what is bizarre is the authorities’ belief that if they did not have any
such links, they cannot have had any religious motive.
Despite evidence such as Tamerlan
Tsarnaev’s outbursts at a Boston mosque, where he denounced clerics' references
to Thanksgiving and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as ‘contrary to Islam’,
the brothers were described by Philip Mudd, the former Deputy Director of
National Security at the FBI and the former Deputy Director of the
Counterterrorist Centre for the CIA, as merely ‘angry kids’. Mudd told Charlie Rose:
‘They
may be disenfranchised. They may have had a bad experience at school. They may
not have friends, and they say, “Look, we want to do something.” This tactic of
terrorism is a tactic of the 21st century. I don’t necessarily think these are
real jihadi terrorists. I think they’re angry kids.’
You really do have to pinch yourself. How
in heaven’s name can a guy like Mudd, with his background in so-called
intelligence, possibly come up with anything quite so stupendously shallow? It
is precisely such angry, isolated, disturbed kids who are vulnerable to
Islamist preachers who target, groom and manipulate them -- whether in person
or through the internet -- to believe that ‘Islam is the answer’ and that they
are its soldiers engaged in holy war against the unbelievers.
The wilful and perverse refusal to
acknowledge the religious nature of this holy war -- and worse, to lay the
blame for such terrorism on the the society that is its victim -- is what lies
behind the Benghazi scandal.
The House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee hearings this week produced testimony from Gregory Hicks, the former
deputy to the murdered Ambassador Stevens, that was simply devastating for the
Obama administration and its former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton -- who
infamously erupted, under questioning last January about the nature of the
attack,
‘What difference, at
this point, does it make?’
Well, Mr Hicks has started to provide the
answer. Despite repeated calls for more security to combat the clear threat of
jihadi attack on the US mission, Mrs Clinton’s State Department had farmed out
its security to none other than a jihadist group. When the fatal attack
started, Mr Hicks vainly appealed for fighter jets to buzz the besieged
compound. As the Times (£) reported:
‘When
a team of four special forces troops were about to leave Tripoli, at Mr Hicks's
request, their leader had to stand them down because he was not cleared by
senior military chiefs to travel. Mr Hicks said the furious officer told him:
“This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has shown more balls than
someone in the military.”’
Disingenuously, the Pentagon says in
response that no forces could have arrived in time to mount a rescue. But there
was more lethal testimony from Mr Hicks.
After the attack, the Obama administration
claimed that it had resulted from a protest that had got out of hand over an
anti-islam YouTube video. But Mr Hicks testified that it was known from the
start that it was a jihadi attack which had nothing to do with that
video. The Wall Street Journal reported:
‘Gregory
Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Tripoli, recalled
his last conversation with Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who told him,
"Greg, we're under attack." Mr. Hicks said he knew then that
Islamists were behind the assault. In other words, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's
public claim at the time that an anti-Islam YouTube video spurred the
assault was known inside the government to be false when she and White House
spokesman Jay Carney said it.
‘Mr. Hicks said he briefed Mrs. Clinton
that night, yet the father of victim Tyrone Woods says she later told him that
the YouTubevideo maker would be “prosecuted and arrested” as if he were
responsible for Benghazi. Stranger still, Mr. Hicks says Mrs. Clinton's
then chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, ordered him not to give solo interviews
about the attack to a visiting Congressional delegation.’
Mr Hicks further claims that he was
instructed by officials not to talk to congressional investigators, and then
demoted after he asked why senior Clinton aides had blamed the attack on a
video protest. Again, officials have denied his claim of demotion. But the cat
is now out of the bag. The Times (£) reports that an email has surfaced
revealing that senior State Department figures — including Ms Clinton — knew
within 24 hours that the group responsible for the Benghazi attack was linked
to Islamic terrorists.
Meanwhile, from the beginning of this
affair there have also been persistent questions about quite what the US
mission was actually doing in Benghazi. Now the Washington Times has reported this:
‘A
U.S. intelligence official tells Inside the Ring that the hearing and
congressional inquiries have failed to delve into what the official said is
another major scandal: CIA covert arms shipments to Syrian rebels through
Benghazi.
‘Separately,
a second intelligence source said CIA operations in Libya were based on a
presidential finding signed in March 2011 outlining covert support to the
Libyans. This source said there were signs that some of the arms used in the
Benghazi attack — assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades — ended
up in the hands of the terrorists who carried out the Benghazi attack as a
result of the CIA operation in Libya.
‘The
unanswered questions — that appear unasked by most congressional investigators
— include whether the CIA facility in Benghazi near the diplomatic compound and
the contingent of agency officers working there played a role in the covert
transfer through Turkey of captured Libyan weapons or personnel to rebels
fighting the Bashar Assad regime in Syria.
‘“There
was a ship that transported something to Turkey around the time Ambassador
Chris Stevens met with a Turkish diplomat within hours of his murder,” the
official said. “Was the president's overt or covert policy to arm Syrian
rebels?”’
Was it indeed. If it was, then Benghazi
might turn out to be yet another and particularly terrible example of the
damage Obama has wrought upon the security of America and the free world.
This is a President who, by persisting
with the charade of negotiation with Iran over its race to manufacture its
nuclear bomb, has allowed it to become the dominant power in the region.
That is why Iran’s puppet Assad, who has
just accrued hundreds of Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists to help him win his
bloody civil war, has been able to slaughter more than 80,000 Syrians and use
chemical weapons against them -- while Obama himself may have ineptly armed al
Qaeda inside Syria. For the Washington Times report goes
on:
‘The
official said congressional investigators need to ask whether the president
indirectly or directly helped bolster al Qaeda-linked terrorists in the Jabhat
al-Nusrah front rebel group in Syria and whether the CIA ran guns and other
weapons captured in Libya to the organization.
‘“Every
troubling Middle East-Southwest Asia country — Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and
now maybe Syria — where the Obama administration made a significant policy push
has gone over to Islamists that are now much more hostile to the United
States,” the official said.’
Precisely.
The Benghazi attack was not just
appalling in itself; nor was there merely almost certainly a catastrophic
failure by the Obama administration to protect its people, and then a mighty
cover-up of that failure. Benghazi also serves as a symbol of America’s tragic
abandonment, under the Obama administration, of its historic mission to protect
life and liberty both in its own homeland and in the free world.
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