Warren Terrah: Old School Edition

It took most of my lifetime, but the US finally has the Libyan bombmaker responsible for building the explosive device that downed Pam Am Flight 103.

A Libyan intelligence official accused of making the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 in an international act of terrorism has been taken into U.S. custody and will face federal charges in Washington, the Justice Department said Sunday.

The arrest of Abu Agela Masud Kheir Al-Marimi is a significant milestone in the decades-old investigation into the attack that killed 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground. American authorities in December 2020 announced charges against Masud, who was in Libyan custody at the time. Though he is the third Libyan intelligence official charged in the U.S. in connection with the attack, he would be the first to appear in an American courtroom for prosecution.

The New York-bound Pan Am flight exploded over Lockerbie less than an hour after takeoff from London on Dec. 21, 1988. Citizens from 21 different countries were killed. Among the 190 Americans on board were 35 Syracuse University students flying home for Christmas after a semester abroad.

The bombing laid bare the threat of international terrorism more than a decade before the Sept. 11 attacks. It produced global investigations and punishing sanctions while spurring demands for accountability from victims of those killed.

The announcement of charges against Masud on Dec. 21, 2020, came on the 32nd anniversary of the bombing and in the final days of the tenure of then-Attorney General William Barr, who in his first stint as attorney general in the early 1990s had announced criminal charges against two other Libyans intelligence officials.

The Libyan government initially balked at turning over the two men, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, before ultimately surrendering them for prosecution before a panel of Scottish judges sitting in the Netherlands as part of a special arrangement.

The Justice Department said Masud would appear soon in a federal court in Washington, where he faces two criminal counts related to the explosion.

U.S. officials did not say how Masud came to be taken into U.S. custody, but in late November, local Libyan media reported that Masud had been kidnapped by armed men on Nov. 16 from his residence in Tripoli, the capital. That reporting cited a family statement that accused Tripoli authorities of being silent on the abduction.

In November 2021, Najla Mangoush, the foreign minister for the country’s Tripoli-based government, told the BBC in an interview that “we, as a government, are very open in terms of collaboration in this matter,” when asked whether an extradition was possible.

 

Biden administration played hardball and got their man. Let's hope Al-Marimi isn't the last. 

As a personal aside, I was in middle school when the Lockerbie bombing happened. Poppy Bush had easily won the 1988 contest and Reagan was too annoyed because it was interrupting his last Christmas as President, ironically asking reporters if shutting down all air traffic would have been the right thing to do.

They didn't get the bastards.  Joe Biden did, almost 35 years later.

Remember that.

Last Call For Prince Of Darkness, Con't

Our old friend Erik Prince is back in the news, former Trump Miseducation minister Betsy DeVos's brother has been a very, very naughty boy.

Erik Prince, the former head of the security contractor Blackwater Worldwide and a prominent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, violated a United Nations arms embargo on Libya by sending weapons to a militia commander who was attempting to overthrow the internationally backed government, according to U.N. investigators.

A confidential U.N. report obtained by The New York Times and delivered by investigators to the Security Council on Thursday reveals how Mr. Prince deployed a force of foreign mercenaries, armed with attack aircraft, gunboats and cyberwarfare capabilities, to eastern Libya at the height of a major battle in 2019.

As part of the operation, which the report said cost $80 million, the mercenaries also planned to form a hit squad that could track down and kill selected Libyan commanders.

Mr. Prince, a former Navy SEAL and the brother of Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s education secretary, became a symbol of the excesses of privatized American military force when his Blackwater contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.

In the past decade he has relaunched himself as an executive who strikes deals — sometimes for minerals, other times involving military force — in war-addled but resource-rich countries, mostly in Africa.

During the Trump administration, Mr. Prince was a generous donor and a staunch ally of the president, often in league with figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone as they sought to undermine Mr. Trump’s critics. And Mr. Prince came under scrutiny from the Trump-Russia inquiry over his meeting with a Russian banker in 2017.

Mr. Prince refused to cooperate with the U.N. inquiry; his lawyer did not respond to questions about the report. Last year the lawyer, Matthew L. Schwartz, told the Times that Mr. Prince “had nothing whatsoever” to do with military operations in Libya.

The report raises the question of whether Mr. Prince played on his ties to the Trump administration to pull off the Libya operation.

It describes how a friend and former partner of Mr. Prince traveled to Jordan to buy surplus, American-made Cobra helicopters from the Jordanian military — a sale that ordinarily would require American government permission, according to military experts. The friend, assured officials in Jordan that he had “clearances from everywhere” and his team’s work had been approved “at the highest level,” the report found.

But the Jordanians, unimpressed by those claims, stopped the sale, forcing the mercenaries to source new aircraft from South Africa.

A Western official, speaking to the Times on the condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to discuss confidential work, said the investigators had also obtained phone records showing that Mr. Prince’s friend and former partner made several calls to the main White House switchboard in late July 2019, after the mercenary operation ran into trouble.

The accusation that Mr. Prince violated the U.N.’s arms embargo on Libya exposes him to possible U.N. sanctions, including a travel ban and a freeze on his bank accounts and other assets — though such an outcome is uncertain.

Mr. Prince is not the only one to have been accused of violating the decade-old arms embargo on Libya. Rampant meddling by regional and global powers has fueled years of fighting, drawing mercenaries and other profiteers seeking riches from a war that has brought only death and misery to a great many Libyans.

The sheer breadth of evidence in the latest U.N. report — 121 pages of code names, cover stories, offshore bank accounts and secretive weapons transfers spanning eight countries, not to mention a brief appearance by a Hollywood friend of Mr. Prince — provides a glimpse into the secretive world of international mercenaries.

 

Let's be honest, the guy's actual job title is "James Bond Supervillain".  And if the UN has evidence of Prince violating Libya sanctions, then the US has it...and the Justice Department.

 

Have fun, Erik.

The Drums Of War, Con't

Having been at least temporarily halted in his desire for war with Iran and/or Venezuela, the Trump regime is now backing the newest proto-strongman on the block, Libyan "Field Marshal" Khalifa Hifter.

President Trump on Friday abruptly reversed American policy toward Libya, issuing a statement publicly endorsing an aspiring strongman in his battle to depose the United Nations-backed government.

The would-be strongman, Khalifa Hifter, launched a surprise attack on the Libyan capital, Tripoli, more than two weeks ago. Relief agencies said Thursday that more than 200 people had been killed in the battle, and in recent days Mr. Hifter’s forces have started shelling civilian neighborhoods.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement a few days after Mr. Hifter’s militia began its attack that “the administration at the highest levels” had made clear that “we oppose the military offensive” and “urge the immediate halt to these military operations.” Most Western governments and the United Nations have also condemned the attack and demanded a retreat.

Mr. Trump, however, told Mr. Hifter almost the opposite, the White House said Friday.

A militia leader who has given himself the title of Field Marshal, Mr. Hifter, 75, has long sought to portray his fight for power over Libya — including his advance on Tripoli — as a battle against “terrorism.” In the statement on Friday the White House said Mr. Trump had called Mr. Hifter on Monday to endorse that campaign.

Mr. Trump called “to discuss ongoing counterterrorism efforts and the need to achieve peace and stability in Libya,” the White House said in the statement. “The President recognized Field Marshal Hifter’s significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources, and the two discussed a shared vision for Libya’s transition to a stable, democratic political system.”

Analysts said Mr. Trump’s endorsement would embolden Mr. Hifter and hamper United Nations efforts to call for a cease-fire. It could also increase the likelihood that his regional sponsors like Egypt or the United Arab Emirates might intervene on his behalf, as each has in the past in Libya.

The policy reversal came as a surprise in part because Mr. Hifter’s forces also appear to be losing ground. His promises of a quick victory have proved false, and his forces appear outmaneuvered by those aligned against them. Most analysts say that he has little hope of exerting his authority over all of Libya any time soon, so his continued campaign may only prolong the country’s instability.

In the meantime, the battle for Tripoli has now diverted the attention of most of the Libyan militias that had been engaged in combating the fighters of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, said Frederic Wehrey, an expert on Libya at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“It is nuts,” Mr. Wehrey said of Mr. Trump’s statement. “Even judging by the hard-nosed American goals of stabilizing the flow of oil and combating terrorism, this is completely shocking.”

Mr. Trump’s endorsement is the clearest evidence yet of his preference for authoritarianism as the best response to the problems of the Middle East, a sharp departure from the professions of support for democracy by previous American presidents of both parties.

And that's the real issue here.  Trump wants strongmen loyal to him and what the US can offer.  It's a laughable sentiment considering he yips around Putin ankles most days, but I think it's because he wants to build his own cadre of bullies because the man in the Oval Office wants most to be the man in the Kremlin.

Depressing as that is.

Sunday Long Read: Mueller's First Big Case

Thirty years ago, well before Robert Mueller was Special Counsel investigating the most corrupt individual to ever enter the Oval Office, well before he was FBI Director or even before he was Deputy Attorney General, he was a federal prosecutor assigned to what was at the time the most shocking terror attack in American history: the December 1989 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. 

TEN YEARS AGO last Friday, then FBI director Robert Mueller bundled himself in his tan trench coat against the cold December air in Washington, his scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. Sitting on a small stage at Arlington National Cemetery, he scanned the faces arrayed before him—the victims he’d come to know over years, relatives and friends of husbands and wives who would never grow old, college students who would never graduate, business travelers and flight attendants who would never come home.

Burned into Mueller’s memory were the small items those victims had left behind, items that he’d seen on the shelves of a small wooden warehouse outside Lockerbie, Scotland, a visit he would never forget: A teenager’s single white sneaker, an unworn Syracuse University sweatshirt, the wrapped Christmas gifts that would never be opened, a lonely teddy bear.

A decade before the attacks of 9/11—attacks that came during Mueller’s second week as FBI director, and that awoke the rest of America to the threats of terrorism—the bombing of Pan Am 103 had impressed upon Mueller a new global threat.

It had taught him the complexity of responding to international terror attacks, how unprepared the government was to respond to the needs of victims’ families, and how on the global stage justice would always be intertwined with geopolitics. In the intervening years, he had never lost sight of the Lockerbie bombing—known to the FBI by the codename Scotbom—and he had watched the orphaned children from the bombing grow up over the years.

Nearby in the cemetery stood a memorial cairn made of pink sandstone—a single brick representing each of the victims, the stone mined from a Scottish quarry that the doomed flight passed over just seconds before the bomb ripped its baggage hold apart. The crowd that day had gathered near the cairn in the cold to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing.

For a man with an affinity for speaking in prose, not poetry, a man whose staff was accustomed to orders given in crisp sentences as if they were Marines on the battlefield or under cross-examination from a prosecutor in a courtroom, Mueller’s remarks that day soared in a way unlike almost any other speech he’d deliver.

“There are those who say that time heals all wounds. But you know that not to be true. At its best, time may dull the deepest wounds; it cannot make them disappear,” Mueller told the assembled mourners. “Yet out of the darkness of this day comes a ray of light. The light of unity, of friendship, and of comfort from those who once were strangers and who are now bonded together by a terrible moment in time. The light of shared memories that bring smiles instead of sadness. And the light of hope for better days to come.”

He talked of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and of inspiration drawn from Lockerbie’s town crest, with its simple motto, “Forward.” He spoke of what was then a two-decade-long quest for justice, of how on windswept Scottish mores and frigid lochs a generation of FBI agents, investigators, and prosecutors had redoubled their dedication to fighting terrorism.

Mueller closed with a promise: “Today, as we stand here together on this, the darkest of days, we renew that bond. We remember the light these individuals brought to each of you here today. We renew our efforts to bring justice down on those who seek to harm us. We renew our efforts to keep our people safe, and to rid the world of terrorism. We will continue to move forward. But we will never forget.”

Hand bells tolled for each of the victims as their names were read aloud, 270 names, 270 sets of bells.

The investigation, though, was not yet closed. Mueller, although he didn’t know it then, wasn’t done with Pan Am 103. Just months after that speech, the case would test his innate sense of justice and morality in a way that few other cases in his career ever have.

The Lockerbie case defined Mueller's career as a prosecutor, only for politics to see justice denied and the man he helped to convict sent back to Libya by Scotland as a peace offering to the Qaddafi regime.

The Lockerbie bombers got away after doing tremendous damage.  Robert Mueller knows full well the cost of politics in justice.

And he will not let Trump get away.

Last Call For Trumped At The Pump

After 8 years of dealing with President Obama and an America that was going away from oil, OPEC suddenly has Trump and now knows it can leverage oil production to start turning the screws on US consumers.

OPEC clinched a deal to curtail oil supply, confounding skeptics as the need to clear a record global crude glut -- and prove the group’s credibility -- brought about its first cuts in eight years. 

OPEC will reduce production by 1.2 million barrels a day to 32.5 million a day, two delegates said Wednesday during a ministerial meeting in Vienna, asking not to be identified as the decision isn’t yet public. Benchmark Brent crude rose 8 percent to $50.07 a barrel in London at 1:37 p.m. local time. 

After weeks of often tense negotiations, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ three biggest producers -- Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran -- resolved differences over sharing the burden of cuts. Notably, it appears the Saudis accepted that Iran, as a special case, can raise production to about 3.9 million barrels a day. The agreement is also likely to include an additional reduction of about 600,000 barrels a day by non-OPEC countries. 

“This should be a wake-up call for skeptics who have argued the death of OPEC,” said Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at Energy Aspects Ltd. “The group wants to push inventories down.” 

The deal promises to revive the tattered finances of countries from Venezuela to Libya and restore flagging confidence in the producer bloc that controls 40 percent of the world’s oil. But the consequences will reverberate far beyond OPEC, giving a boost to U.S. shale drillers crippled by a two-year price rout and oil giants such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc, which have cut spending to the bone to weather the prolonged downturn.

So the countries Trump has repeatedly criticized during his campaign like Iran, Venezuela and Libya stand to benefit the most from a new, more muscular OPEC.  Like it or not, the global energy trade war that Trump all but promised is on, and rising oil and gas prices are just the first step.

Trump will of course look to retaliate by wrecking the environment to put new drilling and fracking everywhere in the US in order to try to boost production instead of beating OPEC at their own game as Obama has and lowering demand through alternative energy. He played hardball.

Trump on the other hand just helped his Saudi buddies make billions off of US consumers, and then there's the biggest non-OPEC economic winner when the price of oil goes up: Russia.  It's almost like there's a pattern here, guys.

So we'll have an oil price war AND global warming accelerating.  Won't that be fun?

Sunday Long Read: 15 Years And A World Apart

As we now approach 15 years since September 11, 2001, this week's Sunday Long Read is Scott Anderson's sweeping magnum opus in the NY Times Magazine on how Iraq came apart and took the rest of the Middle East with it. It is the story of how the cosmically awful and morally indefensible actions of Bush 43 and the multiple failures to fix the problem by Obama during that time affected the ground level view of the mayhem we caused over the last decade and a half, all from the point of view of the people who lived there, whose lives America destroyed.

The opening note from the editor-in-chief sums it up:

This is a story unlike any we have previously published. It is much longer than the typical New York Times Magazine feature story; in print, it occupies an entire issue. The product of some 18 months of reporting, it tells the story of the catastrophe that has fractured the Arab world since the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago, leading to the rise of ISIS and the global refugee crisis. The geography of this catastrophe is broad and its causes are many, but its consequences — war and uncertainty throughout the world — are familiar to us all. Scott Anderson’s story gives the reader a visceral sense of how it all unfolded, through the eyes of six characters in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. Accompanying Anderson’s text are 10 portfolios by the photographer Paolo Pellegrin, drawn from his extensive travels across the region over the last 14 years, as well as a landmark virtual-reality experience that embeds the viewer with the Iraqi fighting forces during the battle to retake Falluja.

It is unprecedented for us to focus so much energy and attention on a single story, and to ask our readers to do the same. We would not do so were we not convinced that what follows is one of the most clear-eyed, powerful and human explanations of what has gone wrong in this region that you will ever read.

This took me most of the morning to get though, and it was absolutely worth it, and it may be the single most important foreign policy piece I've read in years.  I would have missed it if my best friend hadn't tipped me off to it, so thank you.

Sunday Long Read: Obama Looks Back

Needless to say, your Sunday Long Read this week is Jeffrey Goldberg's tour de force interview with President Obama on foreign policy, aptly titled "The Obama Doctrine".

Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square. As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft. 

At the outset of the Syrian uprising, in early 2011, Power argued that the rebels, drawn from the ranks of ordinary citizens, deserved America’s enthusiastic support. Others noted that the rebels were farmers and doctors and carpenters, comparing these revolutionaries to the men who won America’s war for independence. 

Obama flipped this plea on its head. “When you have a professional army,” he once told me, “that is well armed and sponsored by two large states”—Iran and Russia—“who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict …” He paused. “The notion that we could have—in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces—changed the equation on the ground there was never true.” The message Obama telegraphed in speeches and interviews was clear: He would not end up like the second President Bush—a president who became tragically overextended in the Middle East, whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded soldiers, who was helpless to stop the obliteration of his reputation, even when he recalibrated his policies in his second term. Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.”

Obama’s reticence frustrated Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.)

Syria, for Obama, represented a slope potentially as slippery as Iraq. In his first term, he came to believe that only a handful of threats in the Middle East conceivably warranted direct U.S. military intervention. These included the threat posed by al‑Qaeda; threats to the continued existence of Israel (“It would be a moral failing for me as president of the United States” not to defend Israel, he once told me); and, not unrelated to Israel’s security, the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. The danger to the United States posed by the Assad regime did not rise to the level of these challenges. 

Given Obama’s reticence about intervention, the bright-red line he drew for Assad in the summer of 2012 was striking. Even his own advisers were surprised. “I didn’t know it was coming,” his secretary of defense at the time, Leon Panetta, told me. I was told that Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly warned Obama against drawing a red line on chemical weapons, fearing that it would one day have to be enforced.

It's a good piece, and as much as I would absolutely love an Obama third term, Goldberg reminds us that the president too is human and has made some pretty big mistakes as well as major victories. On the balance of the whole however, the Obama Doctrine is a major improvement over that of his predecessors, and I fear we'll learn to miss him at the helm rather early in 2017, one way or another.

But there are also some amazing shade being thrown here at both Israel and America's Arab world allies, and it's brilliant to see that Obama pegged both groups as untrustworthy and pretty awful.  It's amazing that he got as far as he did here given the truly terrible state of US foreign policy blowback.

Oh yeah, and Putin.

Hillary The Hawk

As Hillary Clinton rolled to an easy victory in South Carolina last night, NY Times writers Jo Becker and Scott Shane apparently have little time to waste ahead of Super Tuesday pinning the Obama administration's regime change in Libya and its less-than-successful outcome squarely on Hillary's "smart power" doctrine.

BY THE TIME Mahmoud Jibril cleared customs at Le Bourget airport and sped into Paris, the American secretary of state had been waiting for hours. But this was not a meeting Hillary Clinton could cancel. Their encounter could decide whether America was again going to war.

In the throes of the Arab Spring, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was facing a furious revolt by Libyans determined to end his quixotic 42-year rule. The dictator’s forces were approaching Benghazi, the crucible of the rebellion, and threatening a blood bath. France and Britain were urging the United States to join them in a military campaign to halt Colonel Qaddafi’s troops, and now the Arab League, too, was calling for action.

President Obama was deeply wary of another military venture in a Muslim country. Most of his senior advisers were telling him to stay out. Still, he dispatched Mrs. Clinton to sound out Mr. Jibril, a leader of the Libyan opposition. Their late-night meeting on March 14, 2011, would be the first chance for a top American official to get a sense of whom, exactly, the United States was being asked to support.

In her suite at the Westin, she and Mr. Jibril, a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, spoke at length about the fast-moving military situation in Libya. But Mrs. Clinton was clearly also thinking about Iraq, and its hard lessons for American intervention.

Did the opposition’s Transitional National Council really represent the whole of a deeply divided country, or just one region? What if Colonel Qaddafi quit, fled or was killed — did they have a plan for what came next?

“She was asking every question you could imagine,” Mr. Jibril recalled.

Mrs. Clinton was won over. Opposition leaders “said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,” said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. “They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.”

 And then we get into the brutal truth.

Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.

The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.

This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Muslim country. As she once again seeks the White House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and especially of her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of today: whether, when and how the United States should wield its military power in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

There is a reason I didn't vote for Clinton in 2008, even living in Kentucky where I knew Barack Obama had no electoral chance.  As much as I think Bernie Sanders really doesn't have a grasp of foreign policy issues, and Donald Trump's grasp of them is that of a six-year-old with a shiny red button marked "Blow shit up!", Hillary Clinton has extensive foreign policy experience, and that more than anything else makes me wish for an Obama third term.

I will settle for Sanders or Clinton.  Trump will have started WW III by this time next year.  But yes, let us not forget Hillary is a hawk, and Libya is a mess that we rarely hear about because Syria is so much worse right now.

I'd dare say that the Libya mess made us so hesitant on Syria that we under-reacted to Assad.  If we had not gone after Qaddafi, would Assad still be an issue?  Probably, but it's worth mulling over when you go to the primary polls.

Yes, I would still vote for Hillary or Bernie over any Republican.  But I'm still not sure which one I want, and there are things I like and dislike about both.

It's the timing of the article I question, especially given this.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in his bid to become President of the United States this morning on "Meet the Press." She also resigned as Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee. Just last month, she said she couldn't take sides due to her position with the DNC.

Gabbard specifically pointed to Sanders' position on military intervention as part of her endorsement reasoning.

"As a veteran, as a soldier, I've seen firsthand the true cost of war. … As we look at our choices as to who our next Commander-in-chief will be is to recognize the necessity to have a Commander-in-chief who has foresight. Who exercises good judgment. Who looks beyond the consequences -- who looks at the consequences of the actions that they are willing to take before they take those actions. So that we don't continue to find ourselves in these failures that have resulted in chaos in the Middle East and so much loss of life," Gabbard said.

So the same time this article drops,  Rep. Gabbard resigns from the DNC to back Bernie over Hillary's hawk positions, both dropping the day after Bernie gets cremated in SC by 45 points.

That's not a coincidence, considering Super Tuesday is in less than 72 hours.  Taken collectively, that bothers me.

We'll see.

Ben-Gone-Zi

Seems that after two years of trying to find some way to tie the deaths of a US ambassador and three other State Department employees in Benghazi, Libya to direct negligence by either the President or Hillary Clinton, the GOP House Intel Committee investigation has found...

...Nothing.  No wrongdoing by anyone in the administration.

A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, intelligence about who carried it out and why was contradictory, the report found. That led Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to inaccurately assert that the attack had evolved from a protest, when in fact there had been no protest. But it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call, the committee found. The report did not conclude that Rice or any other government official acted in bad faith or intentionally misled the American people.

The House Intelligence Committee report was released with little fanfare on the Friday before Thanksgiving week. Many of its findings echo those of six previous investigations by various congressional committees and a State Department panel. The eighth Benghazi investigation is being carried out by a House Select Committee appointed in May.

So the House GOP buried it in a Friday night news dump last night, because it's a massive embarrassment to them, and the last thing they want to do is have to explain to taxpayers why they wasted millions of dollars on over a half-a-dozen witch hunts against a President they despise, and found absolutely nothing.

But remember, it's Obama that chose "confrontation over cooperation" with Republicans, Republicans who never had any intention of working with him.

60 Minutes Left In Your Credibility

Looks like last Sunday's 60 Minutes hatchet job on Benghazi is falling apart faster than CBS reporter Lara Logan's reputation.

CBS correspondent Lara Logan apologized to viewers Friday for a disputed "60 Minutes" report on the Benghazi attack and said the program would issue a correction. 

"Today the truth is that we made a mistake," Logan said on "CBS This Morning." 

At the center of the dispute is Dylan Davies, a British security contractor who under a pseudonym gave "60 Minutes" a heroic account of his involvement in the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. After the program aired, the Washington Postand the New York Times discovered contradictions between the account Davies gave "60 Minutes" and the descriptions of the attack the contractor gave to his employer and to the FBI. 

Those reports raised questions about whether Davies was actually present at the Benghazi compound on the night of the attack, casting doubt onto the contractor's credibility as a source. 

CBS issued a statement Thursday that said the network had learned of "new information" undercutting Davies' account and was looking into the matter. 

Logan told viewers that the program took Davies' vetting "very seriously," but that the contractor "misled" them. 

"We were wrong to put him on air," Logan said.

Of course, the real issue is that this now discredited Benghazi bombshell was cited by several Republicans as the reason they were going to filibuster judicial nominations this week, and did so, blocking nominations for one DC Circuit Court judge and threatening more.

But no big deal, right?  Media's in the tank for Obama, right?  Oh, but it gets worse for CBS.  The book that Davies wrote?  CBS owns publisher Simon and Schuster, who printed the book.

Simon & Schuster has pulled The Embassy House after author "Morgan Jones" (real name Dylan Davies) was exposed as giving contradictory statements about his whereabouts on the night of the 2012 Benghazi attacks. Earlier today, 60 Minutes reporter Lara Logan apologized for airing Davies' account in an October 27 report. 

Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement from spokesperson Jennifer Robinson: "In light of information that has been brought to our attention since the initial publication of THE EMBASSY HOUSE, we have withdrawn from publication and sale all formats of this book, and are recommending that booksellers do the same. We also are notifying accounts that they may return the book to us."

Threshold Editions released The Embassy House on October 29, two days after 60 Minutes ran a segment featuring Davies and his claims about his activities on September 11, 2012. The 60 Minutes report rehashed old myths about Benghazi, including the debunked claim that there's a "lingering question" about why no U.S. military forces from outside the Libya were able to help the diplomatic facilities.

60 Minutes' report on Davies and Benghazi failed to disclose that Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS. Lara Logan later conceded to The New York Times that the program should have disclosed the financial connection.

So yes, the "exclusive interview" with the author of the book that was Logan's "Benghazi bombshell" was really CBS just hyping the book it owned the publisher for, with an imprint dedicated to putting out right-wing propaganda, and CBS then knowingly ran with a false story to attack Democrats.

The network cooked this Benghazi falsehood up from conception, published the book, then hyped the book and its garbage on 60 Minutes in order to appeal to wingers.

A former "60 Minutes" producer who was fired over a 2004 story about then-President George W. Bush's service in the Air National Guard said Friday that CBS' now retracted story about the attack in Benghazi, Libya was done to appeal to conservatives.

"My concern is that the story was done very pointedly to appeal to a more conservative audience's beliefs about what happened at Benghazi," Mary Mapes told Media Matters. "They appear to have done that story to appeal specifically to a politically conservative audience that is obsessed with Benghazi and believes that Benghazi was much more than a tragedy."

But "liberal media" and everything.

Metal Gear Stupid: Benghazi Revengance

Turns out last week's 60 Minutes "bombshell" report on Benghazi came from the imagination of the "eyewitness" to the attack on the diplomatic compound...who was never actually at the compound during the attack.  Matt Gertz at MMFA:

The Benghazi "witness" featured in a CBS 60 Minutes report that galvanized new discussion of the administration's response to the attack previously said he never got near the diplomatic compound on the night of the attack, according to a report from The Washington Post.

The revelation comes just days after Fox News reported that they had previously been using the same man as a source, but broke contact after he asked the network for money. Two days after the CBS report aired, Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon and Schuster that "specializes in conservative non-fiction," published the supposed witness' book, The Embassy House: The Explosive Eyewitness Account of the Libyan Embassy Siege by the Soldier Who Was There. According to the Post, the book "largely comports with the 60 Minutes account."

Together, these details paint a damning picture of the credibility of the supposed eyewitness -- and that of the CBS report which promoted his story.

Oops.  The guy was in it to sell his book and get famous.  And he used four dead Americans to do it.  Nice.

During the October 27 report, which was based on a year-long investigation by correspondent Lara Logan and producer Max McCellan, Logan described the man, identified as "Morgan Jones, a pseuodonym he's using for his own safety," as "a security officer who witnessed the attack." She explained that during the attack, "Jones scaled the twelve-foot high wall of the compound that was still overrun with al Qaeda fighters"; during an interview, he told her he had personally struck one of those terrorists in the face with his rifle butt. After the attack, "Jones" claimed in the report that he went to the Benghazi hospital and saw Ambassador Chris Stevens' body.

"Jones" also told CBS' audience that he had been worried about the compound coming under attack, and that Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, who died in the assault, had shared similar concerns with him. 

But according to the Post, "Jones," whose real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies, revealed none of those details in the incident report to his security contractor employer that he wrote following the attack. Instead, he wrote that he never got near the compound that night and learned of Stevens' death from a colleague.

I'm sure selling a book that's titled "The Explosive Eyewitness Account of the Libyan Embassy Siege by the Soldier Who Was There"when you weren't actually there is just a minor oversight.  Clearly this guy is an Obama plant!

Also, good job Lara Logan, you got conned and staked your career on this joker.   Great call for journalistic integrity.

Orange (Julius) Is The New Black (Ops)

It seems House Speaker John Boehner doesn't have enough BENGHAZI!11! in his Benghazi, so he's getting a not-so-subtle reminder up in his district from some real nutjobs who he really works for.

The advocacy group Special Operations Speaks (SOS) recently announced that it is circulating a petition and would be placing billboards in Boehner’s congressional district calling out the Speaker for turning his back on the cause. “ONE MAN stands between the American people and the Watergate-style Select Committee needed to get to the truth and deliver justice. It’s not Barack Obama. It’s not Eric Holder. It’s not John Kerry either,” the email announces, “House Speaker John Boehner is the ONE MAN blocking a real investigation of Benghazi.”

“Boehner’s stonewalling is helping Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and the rest of Obama’s corrupt administration get away with the deadliest scandal in American history,” the email goes on to read, referencing the various debunked theories about the supposed cover-up. According to SOS, by not taking action on forming a special committee, Boehner “continues to help hide the truth by denying a vote to form a Select Committee.”

Orange Julius is about to get his smoothie drank, yo.  And there's more trouble in Washington waiting for him when he gets back from his summer tanning.

Boehner is also receiving push back from rank-and-file members on his unwillingness to treat Benghazi as a Watergate-level scandal. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), the leading advocate for the creation of a special committee, filed a bill to do just that, signing up 163 co-sponsors onto H.Res. 36. Boehner has refused to allow that bill to hit the floor, however, leaving it for now in the House Rules Committee. In response, Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) in late July filed what’s known as a discharge petition to help get the bill out of committee and up for a vote, which SOS’s billboard urges Boehner’s constituents to call him in support of.
Stockton, Wolf, and Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) all took part in an unveiling of a 60-foot long petition — at a press conference sponsored by SOS — calling on Boehner to act swiftly on the discharge petition, an event that Fox News heavily promoted. Fox News contributor and former Congressman Allen West (R-FL) has also weighed in on the matter, accusing Boehner and other Republicans of complicity in the alleged “cover-up” for not supporting the special committee. The Speaker’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the discharge petition and the billboards going up in Ohio.

The most comically inept "House leader" in decades continues his tangerine-tinged tumble from the heights of power.  If his own party is openly coming after him at this point over not being rabid enough on Benghazi, things are going to get real interesting later on.

Last Call For A Mystery

Joy Reid does some detective work on which Republican leaked the bad Benghazi email to ABC's Jonathan Karl.  Her most likely suspect probably won't surprise you:

A very trusted source of mine gave me a cryptic piece of advice yesterday, which was to take a look at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. I didn’t know quite what to make of it at the time, but tonight it occurred to me: could someone on that committee also have been on the Select Committee on Intelligence, which is the one that got the email briefing in February?

Well, it turns out there's one and only one Republican senator on both Senate committees:

Oklahoma's Tom Coburn.

Now, what makes Coburn interesting?

On May 9th — literally the day before Jonathan Karl’s “bombshell” report went live, Coburn appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, with his old pal and fellow House of Representatives class of 1994 alumnus (and my work colleague) Joe Scarborough (Coburn left the House in 2000, per a term limits pledge, and then ran successfully for the Senate in 2004. He announced this year that he would be retiring when his term ends in 2016.) Coburn talked about his failed “tote your gun on federal land” amendment to an unrelated bill, and about Benghazi, among other topics. And and what he had to say on Benghazi was interesting indeed (per the conservative Washington Times):

Hmm.  Coburn promised something new "will come out" the day before Karl's article hit the papers.  Over the weekend, Karl then stood by the "fundamentals" of his original story.  As Joy puts it:

The original story does not in fact, stand. Because the “news” in the original story was that Ben Rhodes, who works for the White House, weighed in, on behalf of said White House, to support a State Department spin on the Benghazi talking points. That was all that was newsworthy in Karl’s report. But since Ben Rhodes never mentioned the State Department in his email — that was the entirely made up part of the “email” Karl claimed in his reporting to have “obtained” and that his news organization supposedly “reviewed” — the guts of the Karl story were false. Like, totally false. And worse, they were either deliberately planted falsehoods fed to Karl by his source … or Karl totally misinterpreted what he was told, in a way that created news where there was one. If Karl is absolving his source, and saying essentially that HE put that “state department” bit into Rhodes’ emailhimself, through his own error, then he has no business covering this story. He probably has no business working in news.

Joy has much more in the story at the link above, but it makes sense that somebody in Coburn's staff did this, which means Sen. Coburn either knew or he has a rogue staffer.  Either way, it's a huge problem for the GOP right now, as well as our "liberal" media.

Ben-Gone-Zi With The Dawn

Surprise!  Last Friday's ABC News hit piece on the President over Benghazi was in fact Jonathan Karl being fed a line of crap and running with it.  Steve Benen:

It seemed as if the story was just about done, until Friday, when all of a sudden, it became front-page news again. What happened? This ABC News report detailed the process through which administration talking points were drafted in September, and included a quote from then-Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes that seemed to suggest the White House wanted to remove specific references to terrorist organizations and CIA warnings. At the same time, the Weekly Standard ran similar information, and the rest of the media pounced.

They shouldn't have. Jake Tapper at CNN reports today that ABC and the Weekly Standard reports were based on misleading information.

Oops.

CNN has obtained an email sent by a top aide of President Barack Obama, in which the aide discusses the Obama administration reaction to the attack on the U.S. posts in Benghazi, Libya. The actual email differs from how sources characterized it to two different media organizations.

The actual email from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes appears to show that whomever leaked it did so in a way that made it appear that the White House primarily concerned with the State Department's desire to remove references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not bring criticism to the department.

In other words, somebody deliberately fed Jon Karl a doctored or paraphrased letter that made it look like the White House was more concerned about covering the State Department's ass than getting to the bottom of Benghazi.  Jon Karl was given a juicy story -- both too good to pass up and too good to be true -- and got burned.  He's got zero credibility now, and he either lied and colluded with a false narrative in order to make the White House look bad, or he's not smart enough to know when he's being played. 

Either situation is fatal in the career of a DC journalist...although he probably has a long career at FOX News should ABC can him.

Four Versus Thousands

John Hinderaker at Power Line is outraged, OUTRAGED I TELL YOU that President Obama did nothing to stop the BENGHAZI MASSACRE DEBACLE and HAS HE NO SHAME?

The White House admitted today that President Obama made no phone calls–none, zero–on the evening of September 11, 2012, during the seven or eight hours when Americans were being murdered in Benghazi. He didn’t talk to Leon Panetta, or any military personnel, or Hillary Clinton. What was he doing that night? We may never know; perhaps writing the speech that he gave at a campaign event the next day in Las Vegas.

Information on Benghazi has to be pried out of the administration with a crowbar; Lindsay Graham got the White House to identify the calls that Obama made that night–none–by holding up Chuck Hagel’s confirmation. Graham says he will put a hold on John Brennan, too, until he gets more facts on Benghazi from the stonewalling White House. Good for him.

The administration’s quiescence in the face of the terrorist attack in Benghazi has always seemed inexplicable. Why didn’t anyone try to help the besieged Americans over the course of that long night? Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey testified on Benghazi before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, but their account made no sense. They said that no help was dispatched to try to save the Americans because 1) the State Department never requested it, and 2) there wasn’t enough time. But there was plenty of time, seven or eight hours before the last two Americans were finally overcome.

Hey Johnny?  I've got seven words for you.

"Bin Laden determined to Strike in US".

You see, when the previous President went AWOL, thousands of US civilians died and we got stuck in two decade-plus long wars where hundreds of thousands more died.   The current President is the one who cleaned up that particular Bin Laden mess and is still cleaning up after it.

And you bring up four guys after that happened?  You're not even worth the time to mock, man.  Go away.  Shoo.

The Blockhead Returns

This is getting pretty stale, guys.  Sen. Lindsey Graham goes on the Sunday shows and says he'll block President Obama's national security team nominees (CIA Director, Secretary of Defense) until he gets the "truth about Benghazi".  Only problem is he did this last month, got his hearings, and Hillary Clinton made him look like the buffoon he is.

So now he's taking it out on the President again.

BOB SCHIEFFER (HOST): I’m not sure I understand. What do you plan to do if they don’t give you an answer? Are you going to put a hold on these nominations?

GRAHAM: Yes…How could Susan Rice come on to your show and say there’s flow evidence of a terrorist attack when the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said they knew that night? I think that was a misleading narrative three weeks before our application.

SCHIEFFER: Let me just make sure, because you’re about to make some news mere, I think. Are you saying that you are going to block the nominations — you’re going to block them from coming to a vote until you get an answer to this? John McCain has already said he doesn’t think the Republicans ought to filibuster this. What will you do? You’re just going to put a hold on it? [...]

GRAHAM: I want to know who changed the talking points. Who took the references to Al Qaeda out of the talking points given to Susan Rice? We still don’t know…. I want to know what our president did. What did he do as commander in chief? Did he ever pick up the phone and call anybody? I think this is the stuff the country needs to know.

At this point we've heard from Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, and General Martin Dempsey.  Graham won't give up his broken record idiocy because he wants to...you know I'm not sure at this point.  Graham seems to be sure that the President committed an impeachable act, and he's going to continue to scream like a baby until he's satisfied.

That won't happen until the President is on trial before the full Senate.  And we may not have a CIA Director or Defense Secretary for months, if not years.

Huckleberry Hounding, Ho!

Sen. Lindsey Graham isn't giving up on finding a way to make President Obama burn for Benghazi, and now his increasingly desperate fishing expedition is focusing on outgoing Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, as he told FOX on Monday night:

VAN SUSTEREN: Is Secretary Panetta going to testify?

GRAHAM: Well, I’m not going to — I’m going to block Hagel from going forward until he does.

VAN SUSTEREN: So you’re going to block him.

GRAHAM: Absolutely. Why would we not want to understand what happened during the attack itself? How could our secretary — what happened for seven hours? Why were there no military assets available on September the 11th.

Let's keep in mind Huckleberry here has already sunk Susan Rice, and is threatening to sink John Brennan as new CIA chief  as well.  Now he's going to stop Hagel until he gets to the bottom of this "mystery".

Only one problem, of course.  All of the above have given their answers to Congress already.

Graham’s dogged pursuit of “the truth” is undercut by the fact that many of the questions he’s asking have already been answered. Panetta and other administrations officials have repeatedly stated that due to the attack coming in two waves, and the distance between Libya and Sigonella Air Base in Italy, the U.S. was unable to send military forces to respond. Likewise, the question of the editing of Susan Rice’s Sept. 16 Sunday show statements has been previously identified as the result of an interagency process, in which the CIA itself removed references to Al Qaeda.

It doesn't matter.  Obama has to be guilty of some crime, and Graham won't be satisfied until he makes one up that fits.   And now that recess appointments are impossible, who knows how long America won't have a full cabinet to deal with various issues?

But both sides do it, right?

Do The Huckleberry Block

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham is moving on from complaining about Chuck Hagel as Pentagon head and is the first to jump into the pool of GOP senators threatening to block John Brennan as the President's choice to lead the CIA because of Benghazi.

Sen. Lindsey Graham threatened Tuesday to block Senate consideration of President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the CIA in retaliation for the Obama administration’s failure to provide more details about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The South Carolina Republican’s threat to place a hold on the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director raises doubts about a second senior national security leadership pick by Obama, with several senators already questioning former Sen. Chuck Hagel’s qualifications to be defense secretary.

Needless to say, here we go again.  Graham doesn't want to block his friend John Kerry, so he's going after John Brennan instead with his endless Benghazi stupidity.

“I have not forgotten about the Benghazi debacle and still have many questions about what transpired before, during and after the attack on our consulate,” Graham said in a prepared statement.

“In that regard, I do not believe we should confirm anyone as director of the CIA until our questions are answered – like who changed Ambassador Susan Rice’s talking points and who deleted the references to al Qaida?” Graham said. “My support for a delay in confirmation is not directed at Mr. Brennan, but is an unfortunate, yet necessary action to get information from this administration.”

Big surprise, Huckleberry here will block anyone and everyone because he's President, you know.  He's the most important man in Washington.

It's entirely possible the President will have to make a recess appointment to a cabinet position.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/01/08/179324/sen-lindsey-graham-might-block.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/01/08/179324/sen-lindsey-graham-might-block.html#storylink=cpy

Benghazi Been-Gotcha

FOX News should really just stop talking to actual journalists and experts, because whenever they try to force their propaganda past sane people, stuff like this invariably happens.

Thomas E. Ricks, the veteran defense reporter and author, said he expected his Monday morning appearance on Fox News to last about three minutes. It ended, in fact, after 90 seconds — his last sentence was a description of the network as “a wing of the Republican Party.”

After the interview, a Fox News staffer told Mr. Ricks that he had been rude.

The strange and unusually short interview segment quickly gained the attention of media critics, because criticism of Fox News is rarely aired on Fox News. Mr. Ricks said in an e-mail message afterward that he did not think he was being rude. “I thought I was being honest,” he said. “They asked my opinion, and I gave it.”

The topic was the attack on the United States’s diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Before being thanked and sent on his way, Mr. Ricks said he thought the controversy around the attack was “hyped, by this network especially.”

So, Tom Ricks won't be back on FOX ever again.  Which is sad, because tens of millions of FOX viewers desperately need to see the view outside the network's anti-Obama propaganda bubble.  That won't happen anytime soon either.

Last Call

Dime Brain Darrell Issa strikes again, this time the GOP congressman with the hard-on for his one man crusade against the Obama administration has compromised the identities of Libyans working for the State Department in his zeal to name names over Benghazi.

Issa posted 166 pages of sensitive but unclassified State Department communications related to Libya on the committee's website afternoon as part of his effort to investigate security failures and expose contradictions in the administration's statements regarding the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi that resulted in the death of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

"The American people deserve nothing less than a full explanation from this administration about these events, including why the repeated warnings about a worsening security situation appear to have been ignored by this administration. Americans also deserve a complete explanation about your administration's decision to accelerate a normalized presence in Libya at what now appears to be at the cost of endangering American lives," Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) wrote today in a letter to President Barack Obama.

But Issa didn't bother to redact the names of Libyan civilians and local leaders mentioned in the cables, and just as with the WikiLeaks dump of State Department cables last year, the administration says that Issa has done damage to U.S. efforts to work with those Libyans and exposed them to physical danger from the very groups that had an interest in attacking the U.S. consulate.

"Much like WikiLeaks, when you dump a bunch of documents into the ether, there are a lot of unintended consequences," an administration official told The Cable Friday afternoon. "This does damage to the individuals because they are named, danger to security cooperation because these are militias and groups that we work with and that is now well known, and danger to the investigation, because these people could help us down the road."

But Darrell doesn't care, because all he's interested in is creating a scandal.  For years now he's been hounding Attorney General Eric Holder over the Fast and Furious program, and Holder was exonerated last month.  Now he's changed targets to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  I'm sure it will be just as effective, considering evidence is now mounting that the CIA analysis of the initial attack was exactly what the Obama administration said it was.  If anyone was wrong here, it was, surprise, the CIA.

No word from the right on Issa outing more sensitive information.  Again.  Imagine that.