Category Archives: Terrorism

06.02.13
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The Inquisitr: John McCain Says Syrian Rebels Need Heavy Weapons

John McCain Says Syrian Rebels Need Heavy Weapons

Syrian  rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad and his regime need  heavy weapons, according to US Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who visited the  country in secret earlier this week.

McCain added that the rebels are in need of the weapons, along with  ammunition, in order to counter the regime’s tanks and aircraft. He warned that,  should they not received the weapons, it will impossible for the rebels to win  the country’s bloody civil war.

The world has been reluctant to arm the rebels, including the United States,  though they have been watching the conflict closely. Several Western countries,  including the US, have been supplying  rebel forces with humanitarian aid.

But McCain asserted that the opposition forces need more than first aid and food  supplies. He stated on Friday, “They just can’t fight tanks with  AK-47s.”

The Republican senator and former presidential candidate made a secret,  unannounced trip to Syria on Monday, traveling across the border through Kilis,  Turkey. He spent about two hours with rebel leaders. McCain has also been very  vocal in Congress about his support of arming the Syrian rebels.

McCain added that he arranged the trip with the help of Deputy Secretary of State  William Burns. He added that he spoke to Secretary of State John Kerry  before the trip, but never mentioned the secret trip to Syria. He explained, “It  wasn’t that I was hiding it from him; it just didn’t seem to come up. I thought  Burns was the right guy to go through. They were very important in the  trip.”

Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/683372/john-mccain-says-syrian-rebels-need-heavy-weapons/#qcA9orBdU33ITv4O.99

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The Liberty Report Take: So let’s get this straight, let’s borrow more money from China and add to our unsustainable National Debt where we soon won’t even be able to afford the interest payments so we can fund another country’s civil war.  We can then put our own troops on the ground as the aid and weapons won’t be enough so our sons and daughters can lose their lives defending another country and a new regime that probably won’t like us any better.  We can bomb their roads and bridges and then have our tax payers pay to fix them back up while ours are crumbling at home.  Great plan John…..

Click below for the full article:

http://www.inquisitr.com/683372/john-mccain-says-syrian-rebels-need-heavy-weapons/

05.25.13
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Reason.com: ACLU Calls Bullshit on Obama’s Drone ‘Due Process’ Promises

As Ed Krayewski noted yesterday, not everybody was impressed by President Obama’s national security speech, in which he vowed to make himself be extra specially careful when raining death from the sky on suspected terrorists (and collaterally damaged civilians), including American citizens, with drones. Sen. Rand Paul may have been the pithiest, when he remarked, “I still have concerns over whether flash cards and PowerPoint presentations represent due process.” At greater length, the American Civil Liberties Union also expresses some doubts that “Presidential Policy Guidance,” whatever in hell that is, is the same as due process.

Says, in part, Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU:

To the extent the speech signals an end to signature strikes, recognizes the need for congressional oversight, and restricts the use of drones to threats against the American people, the developments on targeted killings are promising. Yet the president still claims broad authority to carry out targeted killings far from any battlefield, and there is still insufficient transparency. We continue to disagree fundamentally with the idea that due process requirements can be satisfied without any form of judicial oversight by regular federal courts.

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Click below to read the full article.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/24/aclu-calls-bullshit-on-obamas-drone-spee

05.24.13
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CNN: Obama: U.S. will keep deploying drones — when they are only option

Watch this video

Drone strikes are a necessary evil, but one that must be used with more temperance as the United States’ security situation evolves, President Barack Obama said Thursday.

America prefers to capture, interrogate and prosecute terrorists, but there are times when this isn’t possible, Obama said in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington. Terrorists intentionally hide in hard-to-reach locales and putting boots on the ground is often out of the question, he said.

Thus, when the United States is faced with a threat from terrorists in a country where the government has only tenuous or no influence, drones strikes are the only option — and they’re legal because America “is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban and their associated forces,” Obama said.

He added, however, “To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power — or risk abusing it.”

Increased oversight is important, but not easy, Obama said. While he has considered a special court or independent oversight board, those options are problematic, so he plans to talk with Congress to determine how best to handle the deployment of drones, he said.

 The nation’s image was a theme throughout the speech, as Obama emphasized some actions in recent years — drone strikes and Guantanamo Bay key among them — risk creating more threats. The nature of threats against the United States have changed since he took office — they’ve become more localized — and so, too, must efforts to combat them, he said.

“From our use of drones to the detention of terror suspects, the decisions that we are making now will define the type of nation and world that we leave to our children,” he said.

Today, al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan worry more about protecting their own skin than attacking America, he said, but the threat is more diffuse, extending into places such as Yemen, Iraq, Somalia and North Africa. And al Qaeda’s ideology helped fuel attacks like the ones at the Boston Marathon and U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

Obama said the use of lethal force extends to U.S. citizens as well.

On Wednesday, his administration disclosed for the first time that four Americans had been killed in counterterrorist drone strikes overseas, including one person who was targeted by the United States.

“When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America — and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot — his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team,” Obama said.

To stop terrorists from gaining a foothold, drones will be deployed, Obama said, but only when there is an imminent threat; no hope of capturing the targeted terrorist; “near certainty” that civilians won’t be harmed; and “there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat.” Never will a strike be punitive, he said.

Those who die as collateral damage “will haunt us for as long as we live,” the president said, but he emphasized that the targeted individuals aim to exact indiscriminate violence, “and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes.”

It’s not always feasible to send in Special Forces, as in the Osama bin Laden raid, to stamp out terrorism, and even if it were, the introduction of troops could mean more deaths on both sides, Obama said.

“The result would be more U.S. deaths, more Blackhawks down, more confrontations with local populations and an inevitable mission creep in support of such raids that could easily escalate into new wars,” he said.

The American public is split on where and how drones should be used, according to a March poll by Gallup.

Although 65% of respondents said drones should be used against suspected terrorists abroad, only 41% said drones should be used against American citizens who are suspected terrorists in foreign countries.

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What do you think?  Should American Citizens be targeted and killed on American or Foreign soil without due process of law?  Click below for the full article.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/23/politics/obama-terror-speech/index.html?hpt=po_c1

05.17.13
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Reuters: White House fights and loses battle to withhold Benghazi records

President Barack Obama’s White House fought and lost a battle to avoid making public what it claimed were confidential records of internal deliberations over the attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya last September.

Obama administration officials portray their unsuccessful effort to avoid disclosing the records as the end result of a process of “accommodation” which the government’s executive branch routinely uses to respond to frequent requests and subpoenas by Congress for sensitive materials.

But some politicians and legal experts say the administration’s decision to not release the records sooner may have backfired, prolonging the controversy and deepening the determination of critics in Congress to keep the story alive.

“I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who accused the administration of trying to “stonewall Congress at every turn.”

The administration at first refused to show copies of the Benghazi records, including emails and drafts of what proved to be inaccurate public “talking points” about the attack, to anyone outside the executive branch.

In the face of escalating congressional demands for the materials, the administration then offered closed-door briefings on these, officials said.

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/17/us-usa-benghazi-legal-idUSBRE94G0VZ20130517

05.16.13
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NY Times: Early E-Mails on Benghazi Show Internal Divisions

E-mails released by the White House on Wednesday revealed a fierce internal jostling over the government’s official talking points in the aftermath of last September’s attack in Benghazi, Libya, not only between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, but at the highest levels of the C.I.A.

The 100 pages of e-mails showed a disagreement between David H. Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., and his deputy, Michael J. Morell, over how much to disclose in the talking points, which were used by Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, in television appearances days after the attack.

Mr. Morell, administration officials said, deleted a reference in the draft version of the talking points to C.I.A. warnings of extremist threats in Libya, which State Department officials objected to because they feared it would reflect badly on them.

Mr. Morell, officials said, acted on his own and not in response to pressure from the State Department. But when the final draft of the talking points was sent to Mr. Petraeus, he dismissed them, saying “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this,” adding that the heavily scrubbed account would not satisfy the House Democrat who had requested it.

“This is certainly not what Vice Chairman Ruppersberger was hoping to get,” Mr. Petraeus wrote, referring to Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which had asked Mr. Petraeus for talking points to use with reporters in discussing the attack on Benghazi.

The White House released the e-mails to reporters after Republicans seized on snippets of the correspondence that became public on Friday to suggest that President Obama’s national security staff had been complicit in trying to alter the talking points for political reasons.

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/16/us/politics/e-mails-show-jostling-over-benghazi-talking-points.html?_r=0

05.15.13
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Reason.com: On Benghazi, “What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make?” A lot.

animated

It was one of Hillary Clinton’s most infamous utterances during her tenure as secretary of state: “What difference, at this point, does it make?” The comment came at a Senate committee hearing on the attack in Benghazi, and it encapsulated the attitude that Barack Obama’s self-described “most transparent administration in history” has taken to actual transparency.

At issue was who knew what and when about the nature of the Benghazi incident. Was it a preplanned attack by terrorists or a spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic video on YouTube? The question didn’t seem to matter to Clinton, who pushed the YouTube narrative, leading the way in placing blame for the violence on an American’s exercise of free speech. A little later in the same answer, she offered these thoughts about accountablity: “it is, from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime.”

When the attack was fresh, the story of a mob killing on a whim was embraced both by officials and their boosters in the media. (“It’s all about the video,” Chris Matthews told a Romney supporter last October. “Read a newspaper.”) Yet just three days after the assault, a report in The Independent suggested senior officials were becoming “increasingly convinced” the assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi had been “planned.” Last week’s hearingshelped drive home the fact that the YouTube video had nothing to do with the violence. A New York Timeseditorial published just last week managed to miss the point, denouncing the“Republican obsession” over Benghazi while neglecting to mention the deliberately misleading statements government officials had made about the nature of the attack.

The Sunday after the Benghazi assault, UN Ambassador Susan Rice went on the political talk-show circuit to push the narrative of a spontaneous protest. It’s now been revealed that the talking points she relied on had been edited several times to excise all reference to any terrorist connection. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney deflected concern about that by pointing out that Republicans knew about the process. But that’s not relevant. The issue is that the government decided to mislead the American people. Whether the revisions came from the CIA or the State Department, they sought to conceal facts from the public. And government officials didn’t lean on any supposed national security concern for that deception, merely the understanding that what the American people were informed of is what they ought to know.

This “move along, nothing to see” attitude is hardly new to the Obama administration. But this president and his apologists have wrapped themselves in “the truth” in a way few of his predecessors have, even while acting in a relentlessly untransparent manner. Obama promised his would be “the most transparent administration in history,” yet his administration has brought up more cases against leakers (six) than all his predecessors combined, a fact that came up in reporting on the government seizing two months’ worth of phone records from the Associated Press.

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Click below for the full article.

 

05.12.13
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ABC News: Sen. John McCain Asserts Benghazi ‘Cover-Up’

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., this morning described the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi controversy as a “cover up,” following exclusive reporting by ABC News that showed the State Department was involved in editing the CIA’s Benghazi talking points used in the days after the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Libya last year.

“I’d call it a cover-up,” McCain said this morning on “This Week.” “I would call it a cover-up in the extent that there was willful removal of information which was obvious.”

McCain criticized White House spokesperson Jay Carney for his characterization of the edits to the talking points, which were eventually used by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice on five Sunday talks shows the weekend after the Benghazi attack.

“For the president’s spokesman to say, that, ‘Well, there was only words or technical changes made in those emails’ is a flat-out untruth,” McCain said. “That’s just not acceptable.”

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., disputed McCain’s assertions, saying it was “absolutely not” a cover-up, and that the talking point revisions reflected efforts to form a “consensus document that avoided all of the difficult issues.”

“I think this was the classic issue of interagency’s battle about who will say what,” Reed said this morning on “This Week.”

McCain also singled out former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who he suggested would have been aware of the State Department’s emails requesting changes to the talking points.

“I think the secretary of state has played a role in this,” McCain said. “She had to have been in the loop some way, but we don’t know for sure.”

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Click below for the full article:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/05/sen-john-mccain-asserts-benghazi-cover-up/

Update:

Here are 2 additional articles.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/mccain-benghazi-cover-investigation-143339866.html

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/sen-john-mccain-investigate-obama-cover-up-benghazi-sept-11-attack-article-1.1341917

05.12.13
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Telegram: Boston Police chief: “I do not endorse actions that move Boston and our nation into a police state….”

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FBI agents did not tell Boston police they had receiving warnings from Russia’s government in 2011 about suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev and had performed a cursory investigation, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told Congress Thursday, in the first congressional hearing into last month’s terror attack on the Boston Marathon.

Davis said that none of four people he had assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force was aware that the FBI investigated the vague warning, found nothing and had closed the file. One of his detectives was in the dark despite being assigned to the unit that investigated Tsarnaev, Davis said.

“They tell me they received no word about that individual prior to the bombing,” Davis said.

Davis said he would have liked to have known but conceded that it might not have prevented the attack. The commissioner said his detectives would have wanted to interview Tsarnaev.

“The FBI did that and they closed the case out,” he said. “I can’t say I would’ve come to a different conclusion based on the information at the time.”

The House Homeland Security Committee hearing came less than three weeks after Tsarnaev died in a police shootout. His brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was arrested and faces federal terrorism charges.

The committee chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said the hearing will be the first in a series to review the government’s initial response, ask what information authorities received about the brothers before the bombings and whether they handled it correctly.

Thursday’s hearing was unlikely to shed much light on those questions. Nobody from the federal government testified.

But in a time of widespread budget cuts, the hearing began laying the groundwork for an expected push for more counterterrorism money. Both Davis and Kurt Schwartz, the Massachusetts homeland security chief, praised federal grants that for years have kept cities flush with money for equipment and manpower.

“People are alive today” because of money for training and equipment, Schwartz said.

McCaul and Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the committee, also spoke of the importance of federal money, as did former Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the founders of the Department of Homeland Security, who took a new seat as a congressional witness.

“You can’t fight this war without resources,” Lieberman said.

Lieberman said it would have been possible, albeit difficult, to have prevented the bombing. He said the U.S. should have shared threat information with state and local law enforcement.

“When you’re dealing with homegrown radicals, the community around them is going to be your first line of defense,” Lieberman said. “State and local law enforcement will always have a better knowledge of the neighborhood, the institutions the people are going to be involved with.”

In written testimony, Davis told lawmakers that cities should look at deploying more undercover officers and special police units and installing more surveillance cameras — but not at the expense of civil liberties.

“I do not endorse actions that move Boston and our nation into a police state mentality, with surveillance cameras attached to every light pole in the city,” Davis said. “We do not and cannot live in a protective enclosure because of the actions of extremists who seek to disrupt our way of life.”

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.telegram.com/article/20130509/NEWS/130509682/1052