"STOP HILLARY" and Benghazi

Yeah, there's a STOP HILLARY movement -- and it is gathering steam. See here and here.

The latter story (by Josh Rogin) claims that Hillary Clinton refused to brand Boko Haram (the Nigerian group which abducted all those girls) as a terrorist organization. Rogin clearly wants to portray Hillary as a fiend who simply wants black girls to die -- a woman who does evil for evil's sake.

I imagine that we'll be talking about this charge at greater length soon. For right now, it should be noted that Nigeria had asked for Boko Haram not to be designated as a terror group, on the grounds that such a designator would have led to increased suspicions of all Nigerians (at airports and so forth).

But the matter goes beyond that, as we shall discuss in our next post. (I hope.) Suffice it to say that the real story comes down, once again, to those familiar initials -- CIA. Until 2013, the Agency was working with Boko Haram.

That's a story for later. Right now, let's talk about Benghazi and the STOP HILLARY movement.

Why is the STOP HILLARY movement hitting now? It's the perfect time. The Republicans want to sow the seeds of doubt in Democratic minds: "Do we really want to spend four years mired in Clinton scandals?"

At this moment, Democratic behind-the-scenes movers-n-shakers (people who never liked the Clintons in the first place) are looking for alternatives, even though there aren't any really good choices. 

That's why the Benghazi inquest is moving full speed ahead. That's also why the illustration at the other end of that link features a large image of Hillary and a smaller image of Obama.

And that's why the propagandists continue to hammer away at their nonsensical theme...

Tomasky tells us that Susan Rice, then U.N. ambassador to the United Nations, merely told the American people what the CIA told her to say about Benghazi. I’m sorry to say that’s not true. The truth, sadly, is that the Obama White House misled the American people when it redacted a lawfully subpoenaed document that was disclosed only after a lawsuit by Judicial Watch. In that document, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes pushed the notion that the attack was triggered by a spontaneous demonstration, not a breakdown in policy.

Of course, that document doesn't say "Lie!" But that's what the Republicans want people to believe. They've learned that they can make a inane "truth" seem true simply by repeating it.

The fact is, the Obama White House had told media outlets (ABC News for one) that the attack was pre-planned; I've linked to the video evidence in previous posts. Moreover, they really were operating on (conflicting) information they were getting from CIA. (In fact, the intelligence community was giving conflicting accounts as recently as May, 2013.)

What else would you expect? Of course Team Obama was operating solely from info they got from the intelligence community. It's not as though Obama himself was in Libya, investigating the scene.

The Republicans want people to believe that the CIA gave accurate information which the White House changed for political purposes. This charge is bullshit. For two reasons:

1. The CIA was not giving clear and accurate information, and

2. The alleged "change" was not one that most Americans cared about. The Obama administration gained no political benefit in saying that a lot of locals became furious because of an incendiary video.

Which, incidentally, was in fact the case. The video did make locals angry. As I've said many times, it seems that a local militia (already prepared for battle) made opportunistic use of a spontaneous show of public outrage.

It is also a fact that the head of CIA, David Petraeus, had been told by the Republicans that he would be president -- backed by Murdoch millions -- if he played ball. In other words, Obama was reliant on the intelligence coming from a political enemy.

I believe that when the administration finally figured out what Petraeus was up to, they ousted him in a bullshit sex scandal designed not just to engineer his resignation but to sully his chances for high office. We've talked about this sequence of events in previous posts.

The thing is, I don't think the American people care about the "what caused the Benghazi riot" question. Many Americans simply presume that all Muslims are kind of crazy. Those who look into the matter a little more carefully understand that Libya was still in the throes of revolutionary times, and that terrible, insane things happen in revolutions. It is silly for the Republicans to try to drum up a "tastes great -- less filling" shouting match over the immediate cause of that attack.

Besides, it all comes to the same thing. The "Innocence of Muslims" video was a deliberate provocation engineered by freelancing American right-wingers with spooked-up backgrounds. (See previous posts.) Mitt Romney as much as admitted (during his 47% speech) that his forces were going to create a situation in the Middle East designed to make Obama look like Carter.

That's still the Republican game plan. Only now the target is not so much Obama as Hillary.

Damn. Why can't a congressional committee look into this stuff? Why do we have nonsense investigations instead of real investigations?

As for the radical Ansar al-Shariah militia: It was the CIA's job to monitor them, and it remains a question as to whether they were the true prime movers behind the attack. Phil Giraldi's take (which resembles that of Sy Hersh) is certainly of interest...

Benghazi has been described as a U.S. consulate, but it was not. It was an information office that had no diplomatic status. There was a small staff of actual State Department information officers plus local translators. The much larger CIA base was located in a separate building a mile away. It was protected by a not completely reliable local militia. Base management would have no say in the movement of the ambassador and would not be party to his plans, nor would it clear its own operations with the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. In Benghazi, the CIA’s operating directive would have been focused on two objectives: monitoring the local al-Qaeda affiliate group, Ansar al-Sharia, and tracking down weapons liberated from Colonel Gaddafi’s arsenal. Staff consisted of CIA paramilitaries who were working in cooperation with the local militia. The ambassador would not be privy to operational details and would only know in general what the agency was up to. When the ambassador’s party was attacked, the paramilitaries at the CIA base came to the rescue before being driven back into their own compound, where two officers were subsequently killed in a mortar attack.

Something tells me that the Republicans don't want to discuss any of that. Just what role was played by the militia group that the CIA had backed?

The suggestion has even been made that the CIA itself armed Ansar al-Sharia. That claim is mentioned in this 2012 NYT story, but only to deny that such a thing ever happened. But the claim still makes sense, since it is clear that the Agency was arming anyone who was going to rise up against Gaddafy. (That's today's spelling. I change it frequently.)

That story goes on to talk about an Arizona arms dealer named Marc Turi, who was trying to make a buck supplying the Libyan revolutionaries who took out Gaddafy. This is interesting:

Mr. Turi’s application for a license was rejected in late March 2011. Undeterred, he applied again, this time stating only that he planned to ship arms worth more than $200 million to Qatar. In May 2011, his application was approved. Mr. Turi, in an interview, said that his intent was to get weapons to Qatar and that what “the U.S. government and Qatar allowed from there was between them.”

Two months later, though, his home near Phoenix was raided by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Administration officials say he remains under investigation in connection with his arms dealings. The Justice Department would not comment.

Mr. Turi said he believed that United States officials had shut down his proposed arms pipeline because he was getting in the way of the Obama administration’s dealings with Qatar. The Qataris, he complained, imposed no controls on who got the weapons. “They just handed them out like candy,” he said.

Huh. So it certainly seems possible that Ansar al-Shariah might have gotten some, er, candy.

Will the Republicans talk about that? Will the Republicans talk about how the neocons seem to have commandeered the Arab Spring uprisings?

And will the Republicans want to talk about the real Benghazi scandal -- that the CIA's whole purpose there was to steal Libyan heavy weaponry and ship it to the Syrian rebels?

Nope. And I don't think Hillary will want to talk about that either.

Instead, we are going to get incessant argument over Susan Rice's words. "She said it was the video! It WASN'T the video! She deliberately LIED! She told the most important lie in the history of the WORLD! And she did it because Hillary told her to! That's why we've got to make sure Jeb is our next president!"

Tastes great. Less filling. Yawn.