Monthly Archives: May 2013

News

ABC News: State Department scrubbed terrorism details from Benghazi talking points

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The mainstream media is slowly discovering the Benghazi scandal, eight months after it happened.

This time, it’s ABC News reporting.

Excerpt:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

Related: Read the Full Benghazi Talking Point Revisions

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

[…]Summaries of White House and State Department emails – some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard – show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland raised specific objections to this paragraph drafted by the CIA in its earlier versions of the talking points:

“The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned …”

The paragraph was entirely deleted.

Like the final version used by Ambassador Rice on the Sunday shows, the CIA’s first drafts said the attack appeared to have been “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” but the CIA version went on to say, “That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.” The draft went on to specifically name the al Qaeda-affiliated group named Ansar al-Sharia.

Once again, Nuland objected to naming the terrorist groups because “we don’t want to prejudice the investigation.”

The radically leftist BBC now has a story up as well.

Should Hillary Clinton be President after this revelation? This isn’t the first time she’s been caught in a lie and had to recant. The woman embellishes her past in order to appear more experienced and competent than she really is. Period. Like a little child tells lies about himself to seem more grown up.

In case you aren’t following the story, Guy Benson has a list of 12 revelations from the Benghazi hearings in this article.

Here are the ones I thought were most significant:

  1. The Democrats prevented Gregory Hicks from talking to the Congressional investigator.
  2. The Democrats demoted Hicks for objecting to the falsified talking points about the Youtube video.
  3. Ambassador Susan Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied about the Youtube video and protest.
  4. American forces were ordered to “stand down” rather than intervene to stop the terrorist attack.
  5. Hilary Clinton was aware of the repeated requests for more security in Libya.
  6. The ambassador was put in a dangerous situation at the behest of Hilary Clinton.
  7. No U.S. Marines were present to defend the Consulate during the attacks.
  8. The attack lasted eight hours, so there was ample time for the Obama administration to intervene.
  9. Reduced funding because of “austerity” had nothing to do with the lack of security.

I’ll just post the first two with video, because I blogged about 3 and 4 already.

Point #1:

(1) Murdered US Ambassador Chris Stevens’ second in command, Gregory Hicks, was instructed not to speak with a Congressional investigator by Sec. Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.  Hicks said he’d “never” faced a similar demand at any point during his distinguished 22-year diplomatic career. When he refused to comply with this request, the State Department dispatched an attorney to act as a “minder,” who insisted on sitting in on all of Hicks’ discussions with members of Congress (higher quality video is available here):

Video:

Point #2:

(2) When Hicks began to voice strenuous objections to the administration’s inaccurate talking points with State Department higher-ups, the administrationturned hostile.  After being lavishly praised by the president and the Secretary of State for his performance under fire, Assistant Secretary of State Beth Jones instantly reversed course and launched into a “blistering critique” of Hicks’ leadership.  He was subsequently “effectively demoted.”  Hicks called Rice’s talking points “stunning” and “embarrassing.”

Video:

This is important, so be sure and read the whole list.

Related posts

Podcasts

Casey Luskin and Stephen C. Meyer discuss the Cambrian explosion

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The latest episode of ID the Future is short and sweet – only 7 minutes long.

Details:

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin sits down with Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Dr. Meyer explains his inspiration for writing Darwin’s Doubt and discusses the main piece of evidence that Darwin could not explain in his theory.

Special limited time offer: Save 43% and get 4 free digital books when you pre-order Darwin’s Doubt.

You can grab the MP3 here.

Topics:

  • what evidence caused Darwin to doubt his own theory of evolution?
  • has the progress of science made the problem more, or less, problematic for naturalists?
  • why is the problem of the Cambrian explosion so significant in biology?
  • how many animal body plans are there in total?
  • how many animal body plans emerged suddenly in the Cambrian explosion?

If you haven’t yet read Meyer’s first book, “Signature in the Cell”, you should probably grab that one. It’s the best book on intelligent design that’s out right now. It talks about the origin of the first living cell, surveying all naturalistic explanations for it, and concluding that the best explanation – the one most consistent with what we know now – is intelligent design.

News

Large numbers of Christians fleeing oppression in Muslim countries

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Fox News put up an editorial about a tragedy that is often neglected by the liberal media.

Excerpt:

A mass exodus of Christians is currently underway.  Millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other.

[…]In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million. Today fewer than 400,000 remain—the result of an anti-Christian campaign that began with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when countless Christian churches were bombed and countless Christians killed, including by crucifixion and beheading.

The 2010 Baghdad church attack, which saw nearly 60 Christian worshippers slaughtered, is the tip of a decade-long iceberg.

[…]In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs—which had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis came—was murdered. One teenage Syrian girl said: “We left because they were trying to kill us… because we were Christians…. Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house.”

In Egypt, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their homeland soon after the “Arab Spring.” In September 2012, the Sinai’s small Christian community was attacked and evicted by Al Qaeda linked Muslims, Reuters reported. But even before that, the Coptic Orthodox Church lamented the “repeated incidents of displacement of Copts from their homes, whether by force or threat.

[…]In Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as 200,000 Christians fled. According to reports, “the church in Mali faces being eradicated,” especially in the north “where rebels want to establish an independent Islamist state and drive Christians out… there have been house to house searches for Christians who might be in hiding, churches and other Christian property have been looted or destroyed, and people tortured into revealing any Christian relatives.” At least one pastor was beheaded.

Even in European Bosnia, Christians are leaving en mass “amid mounting discrimination and Islamization.” Only 440,000 Catholics remain in the Balkan nation, half the prewar figure.

Problems cited are typical: “while dozens of mosques were built in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, no building permissions [permits] were given for Christian churches.” “Time is running out as there is a worrisome rise in radicalism,” said one authority, who further added that the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina were “persecuted for centuries” after European powers “failed to support them in their struggle against the Ottoman Empire.”

The article has even more disturbing statistics.

This violence is not surprising, considering the attitudes of Muslims in Muslim dominated countries.

Consider this article from the liberal Washington post.

Excerpt:

A majority of Muslims in several countries say that any Muslim who leaves the faith should be executed, with the share who support this nearing two-thirds in Egypt and Pakistan. In Afghanistan, 78 percent say apostates should be killed.

As I wrote yesterday, the issue of apostasy is a complicated one with its roots in Islam’s unique foundational history. But the effect is a deeply chilling one for religious freedom, with atheists and converts often persecuted.

I was listening to a debate recently featuring Jim Wallis and Jay Richards on Christianity and economics, and I was surprised when Jim Wallis sort of threw out this strange thought at the end of one of his speeches about Islam. Something like “What are Christians doing to love their Muslim neighbor?” I think a very good thing for Christians in the West to do would be to realize that not all religions are the same, and that some are more peaceful than others. Maybe instead of worrying about not offending Muslims all the time, we could instead think about what it is like for Christians to be living in these Muslim countries, and facing horrors like being killed, raped and tortured.