The Benghazi Hearings We Need

[portlander23]

The Benghazi Hearings We Need
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Washington Post

What’s tragic about the Benghazi hearings is that they displace the serious inquiries that we desperately need about the direction of our foreign policy.

The United States invaded Iraq more than a decade ago. The assault — with costs including nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers killed and more than $2 trillion and counting — destabilized the entire region. The Islamic State grew in the ruins. No viable government has been created, and U.S. troops are going back in. We went after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan over a decade ago. Now Osama bin Laden is dead, but somehow the United States is becoming the guarantor of an Afghanistan government that can’t defend itself despite billions of dollars’ worth of arms and training. Obama now concedes that 5,500 troops or more will be staying on guard.

We joined with allies to topple Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, and now the situation has descended into chaos. We backed the Saudi assault on Yemen and are wrecking havoc there. We announced that Bashar al-Assad must go in Syria, and now are fighting against both the regime and its leading enemy, the Islamic State.

Washington has always featured intense partisan struggles. But it isn’t false nostalgia to remember that in the past, congressional leaders were prepared to put the nation first, at least some of the time. The Watergate Committee witnessed fierce partisan spats, but also bipartisan efforts to find the truth. The Church Committee hearings probed the record of covert actions and excessive domestic spying, producing positive reforms. Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1960s, challenged the policies of his fellow Democrat, President Lyndon Johnson, in hearings on U.S. foreign policy and the intervention in Vietnam that helped bring a reassessment of that folly. Rather than pursuing Clinton down an e-mail rabbit hole, a special committee inquiry that focused on what we need to learn from this dismal record of intervention would surely have been more important to the nation.

Yet there is virtually no debate — beyond that of mudslinging — on the failed interventions and permanent empire of bases that burden our foreign policy. This should be a centerpiece of serious congressional inquiry and clarifying presidential campaign debate. Surely it is time to challenge a global overreach that, embraced by both parties, has failed repeatedly in the past and seems doomed to fail in the future.

[think]

1. The increased sales of U.S. military weaponry to Qatar is also something that is disturbing

considering the large amount of arms & money that flowed from Qatar to Libyan & Iraqi military groups we aren't aligned with.

Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton's State Department

The monarchy in Qatar had similarly been chastised by the State Department for a raft of human rights abuses. But that country donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was running the State Department. During the three full budgetary years of her tenure, Qatar saw a 14-fold increase in State Department authorizations for direct commercial sales of military equipment and services, as compared to the same time period in Bush’s second term. The department also approved the Pentagon’s separate $750 million sale of multi-mission helicopters to Qatar. That deal would additionally employ as contractors three companies that have all supported the Clinton Foundation over the years: United Technologies, Lockheed Martin and General Electric.

Full article:
http://www.ibtimes.com/clinton-foundation-donors-got-weapons-deals-hillary-clintons-state-department-1934187

How Qatar is funding the rise of Islamist extremists

By David Blair and Richard Spencer - 10:00PM BST 20 Sep 2014

Few outsiders have noticed, but radical Islamists now control Libya's capital. These militias stormed Tripoli last month, forcing the official government to flee and hastening the country's collapse into a failed state.

Moreover, the new overlords of Tripoli are allies of Ansar al-Sharia, a brutal jihadist movement suspected of killing America's then ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and of trying to murder his British counterpart, Sir Dominic Asquith.

~Snip~

Western officials have tracked the Qatari arms flights as they land in the city of Misrata, about 100 miles east of Tripoli, where the Islamist militias have their stronghold. Even after the fall of the capital and the removal of Libya's government, Qatar is "still flying in weapons straight to Misrata airport", said a senior Western official.

~Snip~

Mr Nuaimi is also accused by the US treasury of transferring as much as $2 million per month to "al-Qaeda in Iraq" and $250,000 to al-Shabaab, the movement's affiliate in Somalia. Mr Nuaimi denies the allegations, saying they are motivated by his own criticism of US policy.

But critics question why Qatar has failed to act against him. "It's deeply concerning that these individuals, where sufficient evidence is in place to justify their inclusion on the US sanctions list, continue to be free to undertake their business dealings," said Stephen Barclay, the Conservative MP for North East Cambridgeshire.

Full article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/qatar/11110931/How-Qatar-is-funding-the-rise-of-Islamist-extremists.html

[KoKo]

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