Clinton Benghazi Hearing

[Dmitri]

So what are people's thoughts on the Clinton testimony that took place today? I tried to watch most of it when I could, though I didn't have time to watch all 11 hours. I find it a little disconcerting that, after that 11 hour interview, the chairman declared that basically nothing new was found.

 

[Loco]

I watched it off and on all day yesterday. Honestly, IMHO, it was a total fucking joke. While I do think Clinton is largely responsible for the situation and should absolutely be held accountable (along with some of her staff)- something she and the State Department have totally avoided for years, despite her claims- the committee is a sham that spent years and 5 million dollars of tax payer money to essentially learn nothing we didn't already have from the State Departments own review. This, plus Gowdy's very apparent inability to be objective and professional made the whole thing just painful to watch.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

Hillary Clinton personally murdered those four men with her bare hands.

 

[Dmitri]

Hillary Clinton personally murdered those four men with her bare hands.

That is obviously a lie spread by the Democrats to boost her ratings. We all know that she attacked them at night because she drank their bodies dry, because she's a vampire. Why else did they not show pictures of the body?

 

[BLADE]

Suckas missing the point ITT.

There's a bipartisan scandal here and it's the fact that Stevens et. al died (hardly relevant since it was only four doods working for the State Department, but stay with me) as a direct result of American contacts with jihadist militias in the area like the Darnah Mujahadeen Shurah, and the Ansar-el-Shari'ah. Mr. Stevens himself met with a well-known Turkish supporter and go-between of the latter shortly before the attack and hilariously enough they're the most likely culprit of the attack. A similar attack on a CIA facility in the area (as the boys and girls at Langley were actively getting into bed with these militias --many of them Al Qaeda affiliated) was repulsed rather easily.

Why? This is where it gets murky, but around the same time State is trying to get one over on the spooks over at Langley (bureaucratic bitch fight with recoilless rifle rockets, essentially), it also gets tangled with the Turks and Qataris in the effort to oust Assad, largely for geopolitical reasons (screw Russia, Iran; bolster Israel) but as well as to secure American dominance in the region, as expressed by a mixture of Turkish, Saudi, and Qatari influence on the ground. We already know that the Benghazi facility was being used to run weapons to ISIS inter alia (wittingly or no) in Libya.

We also know that the CIA had been tasked with training the new secret police in Libya to round up political dissidents and to finish setting up a puppet state there.

So how did these weapons (again keep in mind this cache could have been easily monitored given that most of it was stored deep in Calanshio and Rebiana: it was in fact one of the factors that led to Gaddafi's ouster, as he simply couldn't supply his troops with sufficient heavy weapons to put down the rebels) slip out of the country? How is Qatar (a close US ally) able to fund Al-Qaeda- linked (now moderate, one supposes given the presence of ISIS, Jabhat al-Ansar, etc.) militia groups without US intervention or sanctions of the sort we could impose (SWIFT Code bans, etc.) And what does it mean that Ambassador Stevens met with a supporter of one of these militia groups in Libya?

The most charitable interpretation here is that the CIA lost control of the rival jihadist groups it was playing off each other (leading to the death of tens of thousands of Libyans, and imposing tremendous barbarities inside Libya; "worse than Gaddafi") and that it was then further flummoxed by the export of these weapons into Syria (even though borders are easy to close in Libya and its extant seaports are nearly entirely under the Western aegis). In fact the great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh suggests essentially the same as regards at least the sequence of events.

The least charitable interpretation (and the more likely one in my view) is that in light of the simultaneous push around said time (remember the Syrian Redlines? "Arm the Rebels?" And so on?) for intervention in Syria that Secretary Clinton (a champion of intervention in Libya and in Syria), her state department, and the relevant agencies were arming the jihadis in both countries through Qatari and Turkish intermediaries. In public of course, President Obama would give every assurance that the United States was not arming Islamist militias, no sir, but in secret... well it's not the first time the United States has done something like this.

Or perhaps there's a mixture of these narratives here --it's not hard to believe that while these policies were or or less deliberate they were also more or less improvised. Or to believe that the CIA lost control of one of the many congerie of bloodthirsty Salafists/Wahabbis/jihadis in Libya/Syria/both.

In either case both parties knew about it. We shouldn't forget that this was a bipartisan policy --if there was a difference perhaps the Republicans (and some of the more hawkish Democrats) wanted more weapons going to the Syrian "freedom fighters" and possibly more openly. Both parties are presumably well aware due to briefings to the relevant Intelligence Committees of how and why Ambassador Stevens died. Both have closed ranks to cloak the truth about the United States' monstrous role in ruining Libya and in arming some of the most vicious and brutal groups in the world in Syria. Both are protecting what is either CIA/State department/other agencies malfeasance or misfeasance. All the while publicly we still have an ongoing debate as to whether we should really arm the terrorist groups we've been arming all along.

Neat trick.

In essence, we have one group of war criminals trying to incriminate another war criminal. Self-serving and nakedly partisan? Certainly. Hypocritical and myopic? Indubitably. But what else could one expect from people who would orchestrate the ruination of entire societies?

But y'know. Her poll numbers will probably go up because yaaaay Hillary boo Trey Gowdy.