The Benghazi attack was not Hillary's fault. Republicans are responsible.

[cali]

They cut funding. Other than that, file it under bad things happen. Ambassador Stevens was not murdered because of anything she did or didn't do.

It's republican bullshit of the stupidest and ugliest kind.

There is no there there.

[zappaman]

1. Kick and rec.

Sanity.

[DURHAM D]

2. Programming Note:

If you think Hillary murdered Ambassador Stevens this is the thread for you -

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251555176

[gregcrawford]

24. That very post was offered to me a while ago as "proof"...

... that Sanders supporters are terrible, no-good, horrible people. Of the 200-odd responses to that post whose titles indicated that they were Sanders fans, ALL expressed disgust at this post, and rightly so. This is obviously the work of some RW troll posing as a Sanders supporter. It has all of the hallmarks and buzzwords of someone who thinks the Sun shines out of Darrell Issa's, or Trey Gowdy's nether portal. No decent human being believes for a second that Hillary was in any way, shape, or form, responsible for the events in Benghazi; only the sociopaths on the Dark Side of the aisle.

So there.

[bettyellen]

48. True- but there are plenty enough long time DUers who revved that piece of shit.

Frequent posters too. It makes DU suck.

[demmiblue]

3. Agreed. n/t

[Salviati]

4. Anyone who claims otherwise is clearly on the wrong site.

[MelissaB]

5. K&R

[HassleCat]

6. Correct

Thanks for speaking out for the truth.

[Gothmog]

7. Benghazi panel has lasted longer than Church Committee

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/251566-benghazi-panel-now-run-longer-than-church-committee

[daleanime]

27. +1

[TeddyR]

9. I didn't think any Democrat claimed it was Hillary's fault.

It also wasn't the Republican's fault. The fault lies with the terrorists who attacked the embassy and killed the Americans there.

[DURHAM D]

10. Wrong

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251555176

[TeddyR]

38. Ok, I was wrong

I should have said that no serious Democrat blamed Hillary. Random individuals on the Internet don't count.

[hifiguy]

11. 100% agreed, and I say that as a Bernie supporter.

There are many legit reasons to oppose HRC. This nonsense is just that, and not among them. Pure repuke shit-stirring and nothing more.

[KMOD]

12. thank you, hifiguy

[hifiguy]

13. You are entirely welcome.

I calls 'em like I sees 'em and this was a fraud from the get go.

[Old Crow]

32. Agreed 100%. (N/T)

[Martin Eden]

47. Same here. n/t

[MerryBlooms]

14. rec & kick

[sibelian]

15. Agreed...

Thank you, cali.

[SunSeeker]

16. That was refreshing. Thank you.

[dorkzilla]

17. Bernie supporter here - totally agree it was NOT HRC’s fault

I don’t know why we have to echo bullshit we’ve been hearing from the likes of Darrell Issa. DARRELL FUCKING ISSA!!!

I know you’re a fellow Bernie supporter, Cali, and I applaud you for being the adult in the room. That was a horrible post.

[BlueJazz]

18. Yep, I came to that conclusion many moons ago. It's like the rule>

"If the republicans are making a big deal out of something...ignore it, you have 99.9 percent chance of being right"

[Enthusiast]

19. That doesn't surprise me in the least.

[OilemFirchen]

41. That doesn't surprise me in the least.

[mcar]

20. K&R

For truth.

[thebighobgoblin]

21. Beyond that, this is the result of the Neo-Con PNAC 'domino theory'

If we're going to remove dictators and encourage others to do the same, it might be wise to ask who's got next?

[awoke_in_2003]

22. Underfunding didn't help security one bit...

but, embassies get attacked. People who work at them know this. But republicans are idiots. When you point out how many attacks and deaths at embassies happened during the Chimp's reign, their eyes gloss over and they reflexively say "Benghazi". They are quite adept at doublethink. I have read 1984 six times since 1982, and it gets scarier every time I read it, because it keeps getting closer and closer to the reality we live in.

[emulatorloo]

23. Seems like a lot of right-wing based attacks around DU lately

The kind of character assassination and scorched earth politics that the GOP does so well against Democrats.

I am not clear on why some DU'ers want to use those tactics.

[neverforget]

25. Yeah not even close to being Hillary's fault.

K&R

[Indepatriot]

26. Tragedy yes, but in no way HRC's fault.

The GOP did cut funding but the party of "personal responsibility" takes none. APU.

[Metric System]

28. Thank you Cali.

[JEB]

30. GOP bullshit.

They prefer a bullshit game to genuine concerns.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

31. It is GOP bullshit, and I was disgusted to find it on DU.

I'm a Sanders supporter, but I can't stand to see that kind of bullshit thrown at any Democratic candidate. That post should have been hidden the minute it appeared.

[juxtaposed]

33. I feel the attacks were not hillary's nor the repug's fault.

Shit happens, What Stevens was doing at the time has more to do about what happened. He knew the danger and his security group knew it also. I think Stevens knew the dangers of what they were doing there would be met with opposition, thats why they kept their location secret.
Hillary is the gop's scape goat.

[bvar22]

34. It is more than that ,cali.

Tripoli is the capital of Libya, and that is where the real embassy is.
Benghazi was a backwater embassy, split into several sections,
located in the Black Flag/ISIS, Al Qaeda active part of Libya.

I am convinced that the attack on Benghazi was Blow Back from CIA "Black Ops" in this very hostile part of the World.
I can't PROVE it, the USA makes sure of that,
but the attack on the Benghazi Embassy has all the earmarks of a retaliatory strike by militants.
They had no plan to Occupy the Embassy, or to achieve ANY tactical or strategic objective.
Their goal was to raise hell, kill a few if possible, then disappear before sunrise.

[cali]

37. it's virtually all blowback

[bvar22]

40. That it is.

I believe if we would just mind OUR garden and quit fucking with everybody else's,
the World would be a better place.

[leveymg]

51. You hit it on the head: blowback. But, the proof is an open secret, right in the pages of the NYT:

It was his decision to stay on in Benghazi despite warnings he and other US diplomats and CIA officers received that Islamist militia groups he was dealing with in Eastern Libya had growing hostility to aspects of US involvement in the region. Ultimately, it was his choice to remain based on his and others misunderstanding of the Libyan opposition and other US "allies". See, A Deadly Mix in Benghazi by David D. Kirkpatrick December 28, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/benghazi/#/?chapt=0

Members of the local militia groups that the Americans called on for help proved unreliable, even hostile. The fixation on Al Qaeda might have distracted experts from more imminent threats. Those now look like intelligence failures.

More broadly, Mr. Stevens, like his bosses in Washington, believed that the United States could turn a critical mass of the fighters it helped oust Colonel Qaddafi into reliable friends. He died trying.

Let's not forget why Stevens was still in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012 - for 18 months he had been the lead of a US gov't interagency team that was coordinating the armed overthrow of Ghadaffi, and after the regime's complete destruction, a coordinated transfer with Qatar and the UAE of arms and fighters from Libya to Syria. See, U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ Hands, By JAMES RISEN, MARK MAZZETTI and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTDEC. 5, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/world/africa/weapons-sent-to-libyan-rebels-with-us-approval-fell-into-islamist-hands.html?_r=0

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.

. . .

The Obama administration did not initially raise objections when Qatar began shipping arms to opposition groups in Syria, even if it did not offer encouragement, according to current and former administration officials. But they said the United States has growing concerns that, just as in Libya, the Qataris are equipping some of the wrong militants.

The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official. The Qatari assistance to fighters viewed as hostile by the United States demonstrates the Obama administration’s continuing struggles in dealing with the Arab Spring uprisings, as it tries to support popular protest movements while avoiding American military entanglements. Relying on surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off operations, but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American interests.

. . .

He said that Qatar would not have gone through with the arms shipments if the United States had resisted them, but other current and former administration officials said Washington had little leverage at times over Qatari officials. “They march to their own drummer,” said a former senior State Department official. The White House and State Department declined to comment.

. . .

But after the White House decided to encourage Qatar — and on a smaller scale, the United Arab Emirates — to ship arms to the Libyans, President Obama complained in April 2011 to the emir of Qatar that his country was not coordinating its actions in Libya with the United States, the American officials said. “The president made the point to the emir that we needed transparency about what Qatar was doing in Libya,” said a former senior administration official who had been briefed on the matter.

About that same time, Mahmoud Jibril, then the prime minister of the Libyan transitional government, expressed frustration to administration officials that the United States was allowing Qatar to arm extremist groups opposed to the new leadership, according to several American officials. They, like nearly a dozen current and former White House, diplomatic, intelligence, military and foreign officials, would speak only on the condition of anonymity for this article. The administration has never determined where all of the weapons, paid for by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, went inside Libya, officials said. Qatar is believed to have shipped by air and sea small arms, including machine guns, automatic rifles, and ammunition, for which it has demanded reimbursement from Libya’s new government. Some of the arms since have been moved from Libya to militants with ties to Al Qaeda in Mali, where radical jihadi factions have imposed Shariah law in the northern part of the country, the former Defense Department official said. Others have gone to Syria, according to several American and foreign officials and arms traders.

Although NATO provided air support that proved critical for the Libyan rebels, the Obama administration wanted to avoid getting immersed in a ground war, which officials feared could lead the United States into another quagmire in the Middle East.

Within months after the attack in Benghazi, the flow of arms and fighters from Libya to Syria escalated, along with the direct role of Gulf states, particularly Qatar, in large-scale transfers as the US moved toward open arming of the Syrian opposition: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/world/africa/in-a-turnabout-syria-rebels-get-libyan-weapons.html

Evidence gathered in Syria, along with flight-control data and interviews with militia members, smugglers, rebels, analysts and officials in several countries, offers a profile of a complex and active multinational effort, financed largely by Qatar, to transport arms from Libya to Syria’s opposition fighters. Libya’s own former fighters, who sympathize with Syria’s rebels, have been eager collaborators.
. . .

As the United States and its Western allies move toward providing lethal aid to Syrian rebels, these secretive transfers give insight into an unregistered arms pipeline that is difficult to monitor or control. And while the system appears to succeed in moving arms across multiple borders and to select rebel groups, once inside Syria the flow branches out. Extremist fighters, some of them aligned with Al Qaeda, have the money to buy the newly arrived stock, and many rebels are willing to sell.

. . .

Those weapons, which slipped from state custody as Colonel Qaddafi’s people rose against him in 2011, are sent on ships or Qatar Emiri Air Force flights to a network of intelligence agencies and Syrian opposition leaders in Turkey. From there, Syrians distribute the arms according to their own formulas and preferences to particular fighting groups, which in turn issue them to their fighters on the ground, rebels and activists said.

Qatari C-17 cargo aircraft have made at least three stops in Libya this year — including flights from Mitiga airport in Tripoli on Jan. 15 and Feb. 1, and another that departed Benghazi on April 16, according to flight data provided by an aviation official in the region. The planes returned to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The cargo was then flown to Ankara, Turkey, along with other weapons and equipment that the Qataris had been gathering for the rebels, officials and rebels said.

In the end, it was the failure of a US covert activity, which was most enthusiastically promoted and co-managed by David Petraeus' CIA with Hillary Clinton's State Department, that sealed Ambassador Steven's fate. That is a fact that neither the Administration nor Republicans in Congress who essentially agreed with the program of serial regime change want the American public to clearly understand.

[bvar22]

54. Thanks for the info...adding to my file.

This is killer.

In the end, it was the failure of a US covert activity, which was most enthusiastically promoted and co-managed by David Petraeus' CIA with Hillary Clinton's State Department, that sealed Ambassador Steven's fate. That is a fact that neither the Administration nor Republicans in Congress who essentially agreed with the program of serial regime change want the American public to clearly understand.

ANYBODY who has traveled outside the US at all,
KNOWS that Satellite Embassies in 3rd World Countries are CIA fronts.
If you need to go to a US Embassy, go to the one in the capital city.

There is NO DOUBT in my mind that the CIA was running "Black Ops" out of Benghazi,
and paid the price.

[leveymg]

56. They never do pay the piper because of the bipartisan agreement

to allow it and disguise covert action abroad with a thick layer of partisan manure. Rake a few inches below the muck and there lies a vein of truth.

[fbc]

35. Whenever someone concern trolls about lives lost in Benghazi...

Ask them to name the four people who died.

[RoccoR5955]

36. This is true.

They did it so that they could have investigations into Benghazi, and keep Darryl Issa from going out and stealing cars again!

[applegrove]

39. Let us see. How many died on 9/11? Which Bush was never blamed for.

Surely ignoring a August memo did 3000 people in.

[KMOD]

42. I just want to say thanks to cali,

and all the Bernie supporters who have chimed in on this, whether it was a post or a rec.

You all are class acts. Many thanks.

[trueblue2007]

43. Kick and Recommend

[ericson00]

44. anyone who argues otherwise has no place here

thank you Cali. You and I may disagree on a lot, but at least we can agree on this. KNR

[Scuba]

45. Note that the MSM only attacks Hillary over two issues on which she's clean ....

Neither Benghazi nor her email server are real issues.

Meanwhile, they never mention her IWR vote, her support for fracking or the TPP, her close associations with Pete Peterson and Henry Kissinger, her support for more H1B Visas, etc, etc, etc.

Fact is, America's oligarchs would find a Hillary presidency just dandy.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/wall-street-republicans-hillary-clinton-2016-106070

“If it turns out to be Jeb versus Hillary we would love that and either outcome would be fine,” one top Republican-leaning Wall Street lawyer said over lunch in midtown Manhattan last week.

[Vinca]

46. While true, this is an uphill battle.

You have to convince the huge chunk of the population who can't name the Vice President for a million dollar prize.

[Puzzledtraveller]

49. ^^this^^

What we know and the reality on the ground is seldom the same.

[Rstrstx]

50. NOT TRUE!!! She got a text from Stevens

CLEARLY it's all her fault

[Rstrstx]

52. And this was Obama's reply - they're all conspirators!!

[Purveyor]

53. I don't know enough on the issue to make that conclusion. Perhaps the emails will shed more light

on the subject.

That said, I doubt the clinton camp wish to reopen that can of worms but it is going to happen anyway.

[still_one]

55. Thank you. As Bernie has said let's talk about issues that matter

[Bonobo]

57. Absolutely.

But not every attack on Hillary can be defended by say "Benghazi!" either...

[mmonk]

58. True. And they also lost more personnel when they were in charge too.