Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Obama's 3-Part Benghazi Strategy: Lie, Lie, and Lie Again

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Scandal: Newly obtained emails on Benghazi show then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was coached by a key White House aide to lie and ignore the facts known and reported on the ground to make the administration look good.

The fish rots from the head, as the saying goes, and no further proof is needed than a Sept. 14, 2012, email from Ben Rhodes, an assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, contained in more than 100 pages of documents released by Judicial Watch and obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request.

That email, with the subject line: "RE: PREP Call with Susan: Saturday at 4:00 p.m. ET," was sent to other key White House staffers such as then-Communications Director David Plouffe and Press Secretary Jay Carney the day before now-National Security Adviser Susan Rice made her whirlwind tour on five Sunday news show appearances to specifically and emphatically blame an Internet video for the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other nationals were killed.

One of the goals listed in the emails was the need for Rice "to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy." She was also to "reinforce the President and Administration's strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges." Her job was not to tell the truth, but to put lipstick on the Obama administration's Benghazi pig.

INTERNET SMACKDOWN O' THE DAY: Benghazi Edition

Over at The Daily Beast, investigative journalist Eli Lake has been doing yeoman's work exposing the Obama administration's scandals to otherwise clueless Newsweek readers (Lake is responsible for the Beast's inclusion on The Top 150 Conservative Websites, an admittedly controversial move on my part).

Lake's reporting on the latest Benghazi revelations is articulate, factual and damning. As any rational observer could have predicted -- and the latest emails now prove -- the White House lied to the faces of the Benghazi victims' families, lied to the American public, and lied to Congress about the nature of the attack.

Oh, and as an added bonus, President Obama and Hillary Clinton tossed an innocent filmmaker in the clink to reinforce their cover story.

No matter. The point of this particular post -- I'm rambling, I know -- is the commentary following Lake's revelations. An ever-dwindling number of Obama defenders, drones, sycophants, and other miscreants are still attempting to defend the indefensible.

Like this schmuck, who goes by the handle "Leftcoastnative" (a liberal in California? Who knew?):

Here's what republicans would have said if the Benghazi attack had happened on a republican president's watch, and if the Secretary of State's name hadn't been "Clinton."

(crickets.........crickets..........crickets........ crickets.........)

Somewhere deep in the recesses of congressional republicans' digital trash cans, are the deleted e-mails that said: "Whatever you do, don't mention the fact that we cut the State Department's security budget by half a billion dollars in the two yeas before Benghazi, and be sure we keep calling it a consulate even though we all know it was a CIA station."

"And just for the heck of it, let's not mention that Stevens was our point man with the Libyan rebels before he was Ambassador. It might muddy the water. Oh.....if someone asks what the heck the ambassador was doing at a lightly defended CIA station in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11 instead of tucked away safe and sound at the embassy in Tripoli, just pivot to the IRS or Fast and Furious."

Regarding the State Department's security budget, that tired canard -- first marketed by the dumbest Vice President in American history -- was long ago refuted by the State Department itself:

In testimony Wednesday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Charlene Lamb, a deputy assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, was asked, “Was there any budget consideration and lack of budget which led you not to increase the number of people in the security force there?”

Lamb responded, “No, sir.”

Recall that Lamb is the person who denied requests from the top diplomatic security officer in Libya to retain a 16-man team of military personnel who had been protecting diplomats.

But the funniest smackdown of Leftcoastnative's central contention was proferred by "F_this_State":

@Leftcoastnative: I think it's amazing that so many liberals know what would happen in this imaginary alternate universe where a republican got elected instead of obama. You should all really go find a scientist, tell them you can see into alternate realities, and then prove that you can. You'd win a nobel prize for sure, and advance humanity into a new golden age.

It's just amazing that so many people have access to all the multiple universes and never told anyone. The physics community is going to be ecstatic.

And as it pertains to Benghazi, my primary question remains unanswered.

The same Leftist twits who reveled in George W. Bush reading My Pet Goat for seven minutes during the 9/11 attacks (as it turns out, at Secret Service request to prepare for a safe evacuation route to Air Force One) haven't once asked what Barack Obama did for 12 hours after being notified his Ambassador was about to be kidnapped or murdered.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Krauthammer on the sad, amoral, and pathetic excuse for a human being known as Hillary Clinton

Dr. Krauthammer about sums it up.

I find the most scandalous element of this from purely just a human point of view, is the fact that the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, with the bodies of the dead lying in front of her and with the families there, brought up the video and said a video with which we had nothing to do, and then according to one of the family members, when she went over to console that family member, she said ‘We’re going to get the guy who did the video.’


Now, that to me, if she knew that this was a phony story and I’m not sure I can understand how it would be otherwise, is a form of deception that I think is truly scandalous.

The back-story, for those who may have missed it, is here.


HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS: Administration's Benghazi Lies Were an "Effort to Protect, Re-Elect Obama"

The cover-up is confirmed.

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that on April 18, 2014, it obtained 41 new Benghazi-related State Department documents. They include a newly declassified email showing then-White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes and other Obama administration public relations officials attempting to orchestrate a campaign to “reinforce” President Obama and to portray the Benghazi consulate terrorist attack as being “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy.”  Other documents show that State Department officials initially described the incident as an “attack” and a possible kidnap attempt.

Cold-blooded lies invented to hide the fact that American heroes fought and died while awaiting a rescue that would never come.

Previously unreleased internal Obama administration emails show that a coordinated effort was made in the days following the Benghazi terror attacks to portray the incident as “rooted in [an] Internet video, and not [in] a broader failure or policy.”

Emails sent by senior White House adviser Ben Rhodes to other top administration officials reveal an effort to insulate President Barack Obama from the attacks that killed four Americans.

Rhodes sent this email to top White House officials such as David Plouffe and Jay Carney just a day before National Security Adviser Susan Rice made her infamous Sunday news show appearances to discuss the attack.

The “goal,” according to these emails, was “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy.”

Bryan Preston well summarizes the implications for the Beltway Elite.

The “goal,” therefore, was to lie convincingly enough to get the president re-elected. It takes a special coldness to tell that lie with the bodies of the dead in coffins behind you. Hillary Clinton managed that without a trace of a conscience to slow her down...

...It’s well to remember at this point who Ben Rhodes is. According to the White House, he is assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and speechwriting. That sounds nice, but he has no career in the military or intelligence. Rhodes is a career partisan Democrat and Obama loyalist who was put on the National Security Council because he is a loyalist to the man. Not the nation. Or the facts on the ground in Libya or anywhere else. Rhodes’ loyalty belongs to Barack Obama.

He needs to be compelled to testify under oath about all this.

The latest revelation is, in Roger L. Simon's opinion, the lynchpin for an impeachment trial.

The levels of criminality involved in this are mind-boggling. Everyone from Ben Rhodes to Hillary Clinton to Jay Carney to Susan Rice to Mike Morell to Barack Obama and on and on must explain themselves minute-by-minute. American “liberals” and their media consorts should search their souls. People died here...

...Anyone who now considers Benghazi a “fake scandal” is a either a complete liar or a moron. This new release of emails thanks to Judicial Watch is literally a call to arms. We will now see if there is even a figment of honesty in our mainstream media and if our elected representatives are to be trusted in any way.

It is our duty as citizens to put as pressure on those representatives as possible to carry through this investigation to its natural conclusion — impeachment.

In light of this discovery, will the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, finally name a Select Committee on Benghazi?

Will Darrell "Inspector Clouseau" Issa explain why a watchdog group like Judicial Watch -- and not his unfocused and possibly incompetent Oversight Committee -- is doing all of the heavy lifting in this investigation?

Will the media finally admit that they are co-conspirators in the cover-up?

As Preston concludes:

It was not about a movie. The terrorists who attacked the embassy in Cairo wanted to force the U.S. to release the blind sheikh who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center attack. What did the terrorists who attacked Benghazi shortly thereafter want? Why did they attack that facility, and did they know that the U.S. ambassador was there? Where was Barack Obama while Ben Rhodes was directing a cover-up? Why was the military not allowed to respond?

I have my theories.


Hat tip: BadBlue News

RESET: The Obama administration opts for fake sanctions on Putin

Guest post by George Friedman

The United States announced new sanctions on seven Russian government officials April 28. A long-used tactic, sanctions can yield unpredictable effects or have no effect at all, depending upon how they are crafted. It is commonly assumed that sanctions are applied when a target country's actions are deemed unacceptable. The sanctioning nation presumably chooses sanctions to avoid war when war would be too costly or could result in defeat.

Sanctions' stated purpose is to induce behavioral changes in a target state by causing economic pain. To work, sanctions must therefore cause pain. But they must not be so severe that they convince the target state that war is more desirable than capitulating to the demands of the sanctioning nation.

When Sanctions Work Too Well

In July 1941, when the Japanese invaded Indo-China, the United States responded by freezing all Japanese assets. The United Kingdom and the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia) followed suit. The sanctions were quite effective, and Japan wound up cut off from the bulk of international trade, losing 90 percent of its imported oil. Japan had to respond, but instead of withdrawing from Indo-China, it attacked Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese example is worth considering. The United States placed Japan in a situation where its oil supplies would be depleted in months, at which point Japan would cease to be an industrial power. Tokyo could have accepted the American terms, but once it did this, it would have established a U.S. veto over Japanese decisions.

The Japanese did not trust the United States and were convinced that any capitulation to sanctions would simply lead to more U.S. demands. Tokyo understood the risks of war but calculated that these risks were lower than the risks of complying with U.S. demands (though the Japanese might well have been wrong in this calculation, and Franklin Roosevelt might well have known that Tokyo would choose war over capitulation). Faced with sanctions that would cripple the nation, Japan chose war.

Monday, April 28, 2014

A REVOLUTION OF CONSCIENCE: Remembering Pope John Paul II

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Leadership: The pontificate of John Paul II withstood the onslaught of secularism, liberation theology, totalitarianism, even an assassination attempt, and provided a moral compass to a world increasingly adrift.

It is said the late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once dismissed the power of the papacy by asking, "The pope, how many divisions has he got?" But if any pope has shown how much influence a leader can have without an army, it has been this one.

Karol Wojtyla became a priest during the darkest days of the Nazi occupation of Poland, entering a seminary in 1942, an act that risked his very life. Like the first Christians in Rome, he was motivated by faith in a power he believed higher than any on Earth. Having lived under both Nazi and Communist tyranny, he had little tolerance for those who believed mankind could lift itself up.

He rejected "liberation theology" as an attempt to turn religion into a Marxist tool. In April 1990, he said in Prague "the claim to build a world without God has been shown to be an illusion."

In a 1983 visit to Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega's Sandinistas, accustomed to weak and corruptible Catholic leaders, attempted to turn a religious service into a Communist pep rally.

The pope, in effect, told Ortega to shut up and stop desecrating the Mass.

Friday, April 25, 2014

SURPRISE: Islamists Seek to Disguise Nature of Islamists' Attacks inside 9/11 Memorial Museum

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Death Of Truth: An imam objects to a film set to be shown at the National September 11 Memorial Museum because it might make people believe radical Islam was involved in the terrorist attacks. We're not making this up.

It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth. And in this age of political correctness, the war on terrorism — described by this administration as either over or merely a series of overseas contingency operations in response to man-caused disasters — is a classic example.

The lone imam on an interfaith advisory group to the National September 11 Memorial Museum, set to open May 21, has quit in protest of a seven-minute documentary narrated by NBC anchor and noted right-wing extremist Brian Williams because it might give low-information viewers the impression that the al-Qaida terrorists who attacked America and killed 3,000 people were, dare we say it, Muslims.

"The screening of this film in its present state would greatly offend our local Muslim believers as well as any foreign Muslim visitor to the museum," Sheikh Mostafa Elazabawy, the imam of Masjid Manhattan, wrote in a letter to the museum's director.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

EXPERTS: U.S. Woefully Unprepared for EMP-based Blackout

Guest post by Josh Peterson

The catastrophic effects of an electromagnetic pulse-caused blackout could be preventable, but experts warn the civilian world is still not ready.


THEY’RE TESTING: The government testing electromagnetic pulses uses a simulator hanging over an airborne command post.
Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, both congressional advisory boards, said the technology to avoid disaster from electromagnetic pulses exists, and upgrading the nation’s electrical grid is financially viable.

“The problem is not the technology,” Pry said. “We know how to protect against it. It’s not the money, it doesn’t cost that much. The problem is the politics. It always seems to be the politics that gets in the way.”

He said the more officials plan, the lower the estimated cost gets.

“If you do a smart plan — the Congressional EMP Commission estimated that you could protect the whole country for about $2 billion,” Pry told Watchdog.org. “That’s what we give away in foreign aid to Pakistan every year.”

In the first few minutes of an EMP, nearly half a million people would die. That’s the worst-case scenario that author William R. Forstchen estimated in 2011 would be the result of an EMP on the electric grid — whether by an act of God, or a nuclear missile detonating in Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Saturday, April 19, 2014

All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

Another @BiffSpackle instant classic.


Related: March 2009: Obama's "Civilian National Security Force" resurfaces.

Reagan and Levin drop science on Rand Paul, Mike Shedlock, and the rest of the isolationist war-mongers

I respect and often link to Mike Shedlock's Global Economic Analysis site for his take on macroeconomics. His opinions are usually sound and his reasoning and research solid.

On Thursday, April 17th, Mark Levin tore the isolationist-Code Pink-McGovern libertarians a new orifice using a Ronald Reagan speech as an exclamation point. You can listen to it here (MP3 - courtesy of The Mark Levin Show Podcast Downloader Widget).
But when he veers into national defense and international diplomacy, he makes a complete fool of himself. He advocates the Ron Paul/George McGovern strategy of appeasment and weakness, which history tells us is far more dangerous than the alternative.

I like Rand Paul, who appears to be an attractive candidate, except for his isolationist rhetoric that echoes his father's bizarre statements. Isolationism is not conservatism. Appeasement is not conservatism. Weakness is not conservatism.

Today we are witnessing a slow-motion replay of the 1930s with Russia's annexation activities. Putin's actions are bringing instability, fear and trepidation to all of Europe.

And why are we seeing Putin act so aggressively? Because he knows Obama is all bluster and no stick. He sees Obama unilaterally disarming the U.S. military -- eviscerating advanced fighter systems, dismantling nuclear weapons, killing the Tomahawk missile program, to name but a few -- and knows that the president's core belief is that America must be weak.

After all, America is an imperialist war-monger in the view of Obama, Shedlock, Paul, and the other nuts.

I repeat: nuts. Can they not comprehend history? Those bases in other countries? They're there for us. They're there to project power when it's needed. They're there to reassure allies, to demonstrate resolve, and -- ultimately -- to prevent conflict.

A strong national defense? It's for us. It's to ensure that no one dare pick a fight with the United States or its allies. It there to prevent conflict.

That's how Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.

And today we are witnessing all of those gains vanish as the most destructive president in American history orchestrates the rise of a nuclear Iran, a Middle East afire, Red China laying claim to ever-increasing swaths of the Pacific, and Russia creeping ever westward into Europe.

It is the isolationist, Code Pink libertarians that are the war-mongers.

Obama, Shedlock, Paul, and the other isolationists seek war. They seek death and destruction. They ignore the lessons of history that teach us -- over and over again, century after century after century -- that weakness and appeasement beget conflict.

Obama, Shedlock, Paul and their ilk are the war-mongers. They must ignore all of human history to arrive at their bizarre ideology; it is certain that their ignorance will get a lot of people killed.


Hat tip: BadBlue News

Friday, April 18, 2014

What would Reagan do with a punk like Putin?

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Russian Aggression: Instead of a foreign policy that's a blend of Neville Chamberlain and Monty Python, the U.S. should trade flexibility for some backbone, scrap the reset button and start digging some missile silos.

It takes a lot to make Jimmy Carter look like Winston Churchill. But President Obama, who bats not an eye as a Russian warplane buzzes a U.S. warship in the Black Sea, has accomplished that with his pusillanimous policy regarding Moscow's creeping anschluss in Ukraine.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's comparison of current events to the days before World War II is on the mark. On Saturday, March 7, 1936, Hitler ordered three battalions of the German army to cross the Rhine bridges into an area of Germany demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I.

The British and French, fearing war, did nothing. The rest, as they say, is history.

Crimea was Putin's Rhineland, and the sanctions involving travel restrictions on low-level oligarchs was laughable. Tyrants do not move swiftly. They test the waters. They nibble. They watch. Weakness and inaction only delay the inevitable.

When Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev met Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, he hoped the U.S. president would be willing to trade his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) away in exchange for arms-control agreements and vague promises of making nice with America.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

"CIVILIAN NATIONAL SECURITY FORCE": Obama's Goals Become Clear with his Militarized Government

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Federal Fire Power: Instead of putting a lien on the property of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, the Bureau of Land Management surrounded his ranch with 200 armed agents. It's not the only agency with a private army.

Back in 2008, candidate Barack Obama slipped a little-noticed line in a speech, proposing a national police force reporting straight to him.

"We cannot continue to rely only on our military," he said. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

As our military is slowly decimated by his policies and budget cuts — and with federal agencies armed to the teeth — we may be seeing what he had in mind at the ranch of a 67-year-old Nevadan.

Agents of a federal agency that many Americans were surprised to see so heavily armed even herded American citizens into "First Amendment zones," another surprise to those who thought the Constitution made the entire U.S. such a zone.

"The government's option," said Fox News contributor and former Judge Andrew Napolitano, "is to take the amount of money (Bundy) owes them and docket it — that is, file the lien on his property. The federal government could have done that.

"Instead, they wanted this show of force. They swooped in . . . with assault rifles aimed and ready and stole this guy's property, they stole his cattle. They didn't have the right to do that. That's theft, and they should have been arrested by state officials."

The Environmental Protection Agency also has a private army. In late August 2013, armed EPA agents joined agents of the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force and swarmed gold mines near Chicken in the Last Frontier State.

Monday, April 14, 2014

The Tiddlywinks Grandmaster

Spotted at American Digest:


Does it strike anyone else as bizarre that the Obama administration expends more energy catching cows on federal land than preventing drug smugglers from entering the U.S. on the southern border?


Hat tip: Daily Timewaster

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

DANGER ZONE: As Russia Violates Arms Treaty, Obama Continues Slashing U.S. Nuclear Deterrent

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Disarming America: The U.S. has announced plans to place 50 nuclear missiles in storage as part of its commitment to the New START Treaty signed with Russia, ignoring Moscow's violation of another arms treaty.

The Pentagon announced Tuesday the United States' Strategic Force Structure designed "to comply with the New START Treaty," as a Defense Department press release notes. It means that 50 Minuteman III missiles — out of a current force of 450 — will be removed from their silos and stored away.

The silos will be kept "warm," that is, available for future use and for re-insertion of the missiles.

But it is doubtful that an administration that has as its goal a world without nuclear weapons and that promised the Russians "flexibility" in the gutting of U.S. missile defense would ever even contemplate such a move. The missiles are gone.

The Air Force now deploys three ICBM wings on its bases in Wyoming (Francis E. Warren), North Dakota (Minot), and Montana (Malmstrom). Each operates 150 ICBMs, with a squadron consisting of 50. The Obama administration proposes getting rid of one of those squadrons.

The remaining 400 deployed ICBMs would be the lowest number since 1962, according to a history of the ICBM force written by Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists.

Sunday, April 06, 2014

ARMS RACE AMONG THE BUREAUCRATS: Why has every government agency become militarized?

Guest post by Rob Nikolewski

SANTA FE, N.M. — In late February, four federal agents carrying side arms with a drug-sniffing dog descended on the Taos Ski Valley in what was called a “saturation patrol.”

Authorities were working on tips of possible drug selling and impaired driving in the ski resort’s parking lot and surrounding area.

But the agents weren’t from the FBI, ATF or even the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Rather, the agents represented the U.S. Forest Service.

“It’s one of the untold stories about government,” said former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, who lives in Taos, is an avid skier and has been a leading critic of the operation that turned up only a few minor infractions. “People don’t grasp the size and the scope of these entities and their law enforcement arms.”

It may come as a surprise to many U.S. taxpayers, but a slew of federal agencies — some whose responsibilities seem to have little to do with combating crime — carry active law enforcement operations.

Here’s a partial list:

That’s right, NOAA — the folks who forecast the weather, monitor the atmosphere and keep tabs on the oceans and waterways — has its own law enforcement division. It has a budget of $65 million and consists of 191 employees, including 96 special agents and 28 enforcement officers who carry weapons.

Friday, April 04, 2014

STATE DEPARTMENT AUDITOR: Uhm, Any of You Guys See $6 Billion Lying Around Somewhere?

But, hey: what's $6 billion among friends?

The State Department has no idea what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors.

In a special “management alert” made public Thursday, the State Department’s Inspector General Steve Linick warned “significant financial risk and a lack of internal control at the department has led to billions of unaccounted dollars over the last six years.

The alert was just the latest example of the federal government’s continued struggle with oversight over its outside contractors.

The lack of oversight “exposes the department to significant financial risk,” the auditor said. “It creates conditions conducive to fraud, as corrupt individuals may attempt to conceal evidence of illicit behavior by omitting key documents from the contract file. It impairs the ability of the Department to take effective and timely action to protect its interests, and, in tum, those of taxpayers.”

In the memo, the IG detailed “repeated examples of poor contract file administration.” For instance, a recent investigation of the closeout process for contracts supporting the mission in Iraq, showed that auditors couldn't find 33 of the 115 contract files totaling about $2.1 billion. Of the remaining 82 files, auditors said 48 contained insufficient documents required by federal law.

...Before Linick took office last fall, the State Department had been without an inspector general position for five years—the longest IG vacancy in the government’s history, as noted in The Washington Post.


By contrast, the Air Force -- in order to save just $3.5 billion over five years -- slashed the invaluable A-10 Warthog (pictured above) program.

Priorities: for Democrats, waste, fraud and abuse always trump protecting America's warriors.


Hat tip: BB.

Thursday, April 03, 2014

Why are Boehner and Issa helping cover up Obama's scandals?

Once again the IRS appears to be complicit in a targeted leak of a private citizen's tax return to effect a nakedly partisan attack. This time the IRS reportedly leaked the tax return of an executive at Mozilla who had expressed support for traditional marriage.

As for the gun-running operation that killed hundreds, Eric Holder and Barack Obama continue to unlawfully claim "executive privilege" over a massive trove of documents that likely implicate both in "Operation Fast and Furious". Throughout American history, "Executive Privilege" was reserved only for a small, explicitly named set of communications unrelated to a specific criminal investigation. Until Obama, that is.

As for Benghazi? Well, for starters, we still don't know what Barack Obama did for eight hours during a running terror attack that resulted in the deaths of four American diplomats. We still don't know who coordinated the campaign of lies to the victims' families and the American people about the nature of the attack.

So what does Johnny Boehner and his hand-picked Oversight Chairman, Darrell Issa, do? Next to nothing. They hold show hearings. They appear on television. But they refuse to name a Select Investigative Committee for any of these outrageous scandals.


Why?

Allen West has a pretty good idea and I have some additional thoughts (*cough* they got somethin' on him *cough*).


Hat tip: BadBlue News

Another "Gun-Free Zone", Another Preventable Massacre

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Gun Control: Another tragedy at Fort Hood is compounded by the absurdity of well-trained and disciplined soldiers told to "shelter in place" until the police arrive.

The second mass shooting at Fort Hood is not considered an act of terrorism.

It is, however, a grim echo of its predecessor, which was an act of terrorism called "workplace violence." And to this day, the commander in chief calls Maj. Nidal Hasan's Nov. 5, 2009, rampage in which 13 were murdered and 32 wounded "workplace violence."

In that tragedy, Hasan, a self-proclaimed "Soldier of Allah," shouted "Allahu Akhbar" and opened fire on dozens of U.S. civilians and soldiers who were unarmed and unable to fire back. Then, as now and in the Sept. 16, 2013, mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, military personnel trained to defend themselves were unable to do so and had to wait until the police arrived.

Granted, a military base such as Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, is not like a fort in the Old West. It's a place where soldiers trained for war prepare and those returning from war rest with their families and children. It's more like a small town than an armed camp.

But in small towns all across America, private citizens freely exercise their Second Amendment rights and are allowed to carry concealed weapons to defend themselves and their families. Why not U.S. soldiers?

Saturday, March 29, 2014

ALLEN WEST: We may finally know why John Boehner is helping to cover up the Benghazi debacle

Guest post by Allen West

The intricate web spun around the incident at Benghazi seems to have no end. It is really quite shameful for this nation that we have come this far and still have no resolution as to what truly occurred that fateful night of September 11, 2012 — nor do we have a select committee with subpoena powers, despite broad support in the House.

However, there are some who embody the highest level of journalistic integrity and will not allow this story to fade away. One of those individuals is Catherine Herridge of Fox News. Her recent analysis brings forth more questions than answers about how a particular consulting firm, Beacon Global Strategies, is entwined with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others involved with the controversy.

As Herridge reports, Beacon Global Strategies employs former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell, Philippe Reines, whom the New York Times magazine recently described as Clinton’s “principal gatekeeper” and who traveled with her to over a hundred countries, Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff to Leon Panetta and Andrew Shapiro, a Clinton policy adviser at the State Department whose portfolio included ridding Libya of shoulder-launched missiles called MANPADs.

But this is also a bipartisan mess, as Beacon Global Strategies also employs J. Michael Allen, who was a former majority staff director for the House Intelligence Committee.

For the full report by Catherine Herrdige, click here.

One just has to become more and more suspect about what happened in Benghazi, but even more concerning, will we ever ascertain the truth?

Herridge’s report does nothing to dispel my belief there is bipartisan culpability on Benghazi and hence why, even with a majority of House support, we do not have a select committee with subpoena powers.

There are far too many lies, cover-ups, and unanswered questions — not to mention secrecy and questionable maneuvers. I believe one day America will come to know that Benghazi was one of the darkest days in our history, and our government sought to hide the truth.



Read more at AllenBWest.com