Benghazi

How the Clinton Foundation Paid Sidney Blumenthal $10K per Month as He Gave Horrible Libya Advice to the State Dept.

by

Screen Shot 2015-05-28 at 11.23.35 AM

Mr. Gowdy’s chief interest, according to people briefed on the inquiry, is a series of memos that Mr. Blumenthal — who was not an employee of the State Department — wrote to Mrs. Clinton about events unfolding in Libya before and after the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. According to emails obtained by The New York Times, Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.

But an examination by The Times suggests that Mr. Blumenthal’s involvement was more wide-ranging and more complicated than previously known, embodying the blurry lines between business, politics and philanthropy that have enriched and vexed the Clintons and their inner circle for years.

While advising Mrs. Clinton on Libya, Mr. Blumenthal, who had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama, was also employed by her family’s philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research, “message guidance” and the planning of commemorative events, according to foundation officials. 

Much of the Libya intelligence that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs. Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government. The venture, which was ultimately unsuccessful, involved other Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former C.I.A. spy seeking to get in on the ground floor of the new Libyan economy.

– From the New York Times article: Clinton Friend’s Memos on Libya Draw Scrutiny to Politics and Business

Keeping tabs on the shadiness, cronyism and ineptitude of Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State alone is a full time job. I’m not even kidding, it feels like every day I wake up to another story that in itself should be enough to disqualify her as a Presidential candidate. Yet she remains the front runner to win in 2016, which proves without a shadow of a doubt that America is not a functioning democracy, but a clownish oligarch-owned Banana Republic.

Before I get into the many disturbing and dangerous angles to the Sidney Blumenthal story, it’s important to highlight what a complete and total disaster U.S. foreign policy in Libya has been during the Obama Administration. Rather than helping the situation, NATO destroyed the nation and left it far worse than it ever was under Qaddafi. I highlighted this fact in detail earlier this year in the post, The Forgotten War – Understanding the Incredible Debacle Left Behind by NATO in Libya. Here’s an excerpt:

Read more

Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G


Follow me on Twitter.

The Forgotten War – Understanding the Incredible Debacle Left Behind by NATO in Libya

by

Screen Shot 2015-02-23 at 1.09.30 PM

In retrospect, Obama’s intervention in Libya was an abject failure, judged even by its own standards. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased severalfold. Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Qaddafi did during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The Libya intervention has harmed other U.S. interests as well: undermining nuclear nonproliferation, chilling Russian cooperation at the UN, and fueling Syria’s civil war.


As bad as Libya’s human rights situation was under Qaddafi, it has gotten worse since NATO ousted him. Immediately after taking power, the rebels perpetrated scores of reprisal killings, in addition to torturing, beating, and arbitrarily detaining thousands of suspected Qaddafi supporters. The rebels also expelled 30,000 mostly black residents from the town of Tawergha and burned or looted their homes and shops, on the grounds that some of them supposedly had been mercenaries. Six months after the war, Human Rights Watch declared that the abuses “appear to be so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity.”


As a consequence of such pervasive violence, the UN estimates that roughly 400,000 Libyans have fled their homes, a quarter of whom have left the country altogether. 


– From Alan Kuperman’s excellent Foreign Affairs article: Obama’s Libya Debacle

Regular readers will be somewhat familiar with the total chaos NATO left behind in the wake of its so-called “humanitarian” intervention in Libya, but I doubt many of you are aware of just how enormous the disaster actually has become.

Alan J. Kuperman, an Associate Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote an incredible article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, which is an absolute must read. If the American public and politicians actually wanted to learn from their mistakes and avoid making them in the future, this piece could serve as a comprehensive warning about what not to do.

That said, after reading this article the unfortunate truth becomes apparent; that there are only two logical conclusions that can be reached about American foreign policy leadership in the 21st century.

Read more

Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G


Follow me on Twitter.

20-Year CBS News Veteran, Sharyl Attkisson, Details Massive Censorship and Propaganda in Mainstream Media

by

Screen Shot 2014-10-29 at 11.00.00 AMJournalists should be dark, funny, mean people. It’s appropriate for their antagonistic, adversarial role.

– Matt Taibbi, in this New York Magazine article

Reporters on the ground aren’t necessarily ideological, Attkisson says, but the major network news decisions get made by a handful of New York execs who read the same papers and think the same thoughts.

Often they dream up stories beforehand and turn the reporters into “casting agents,” told “we need to find someone who will say . . .” that a given policy is good or bad. “We’re asked to create a reality that fits their New York image of what they believe,” she writes.

– From the excellent New York Post article: Ex-CBS reporter’s book reveals how liberal media protects Obama

Earlier this week, I published a piece titled, Former CBS Reporter Accuses Government of Secretly Planting Classified Docs on Her Computer, which I thought was incredible in its own right, yet the information in that post seems almost trite compared to the flood of information Attkisson has revealed to the New York Post’s Kyle Smith.

The following excerpts from the piece will confirm all of your worst suspicions about mainstream media:

Read more

Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G


Follow me on Twitter.

Former CBS Reporter Accuses Government of Secretly Planting Classified Docs on Her Computer

by

Screen Shot 2014-10-27 at 2.12.13 PMAttkisson speculated on how the Nixon controversy would have been handled in a world filled with today’s television and social media obsessions.

“Nixon would basically refuse to turn over tapes to Congress, his aides would refuse to testify to Congress or would take the Fifth or would lie to Congress with fair amount of impunity,” she said. “Woodward and Bernstein would be controversialized on social media by special and political interests. … Then at the end Nixon would go on a popular late-night comedy show, during which time he would humorously refer to his attackers as people who were political witch-hunters who believed in Area 51-type conspiracy theories.”

– From the Huffington Post article: Sharyl Attkisson Says Journalists Have ‘Gone Backwards’ Since Watergate Scandal

In case you forgot, Sharyl Attkisson is the former CBS News reporter who resigned from the network in March after expressing frustration that her stories covering the Obama Administration’s role in the Benghazi and Fast and Furious scandals were being spiked due to a desire to protect the President.

In 2013, Attkisson also expressed her belief that her computer had been hacked, which CBS News subsequently confirmed. CBS reported at the time:

Read more

Like this post?
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G


Follow me on Twitter.