Free Republic

The lawmaker leading the charge to investigate the Benghazi terror attack on Friday subpoenaed the co-author of a report that slammed the State Department but didn´t interview Hillary Clinton. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) formally demanded that retired ambassador Thomas Pickering submit to being deposed by the committee next Thursday. The subpoena comes in the wake of a series of acrimonious public exchanges this week between the two men. Issa didn´t issue a subpoena to former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen, who co-authored the Benghazi report with Pickering.

Huma Abedin — Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide and the wife of all-but-declared New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner — spent her final months at the State Department working as a part-time consultant with the agency who at the same time was allowed to represent outside clients, POLITICO has confirmed. Abedin, a fixture at the Clintons’ side for at least 15 years — from Iowa to Indonesia — shifted to her new role after maternity leave in the early summer of 2012, according to a source familiar with the arrangement. The new status made her a “special government employee,” which was...

Might as well, I guess.

It seems very odd that the MSM would be participating so vigorously in the reporting on the various scandals that have exploded on the scene since mid last week. I've seen numerous comments scattered about skeptical of the motives behind this uncharacteristic attack by the MSM on the Obama administration. Buried within the Benghazi debacle is information that I believe this administration has carefully kept as obscure as they possibly could for years now, and are now muddying the waters in an effort to keep commentary on the core nature of the Benghazi situation minimalized. The subject they wish to...

Libya is rapidly deteriorating and could fall into bloody chaos at any moment. When Ambassador Christopher Stevens, under orders from the Obama-Clinton regime, first arrived in Libya he came by boat with approximately 80 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) people and contractors. Their mission was to topple Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi supposedly for humanitarian purposes. They accomplished their task by arming, aligning and coordinating with the “rebels”, who turned out to be Jihadists and Islamic militants. The rebel’s top military commander, Abdelhakim Belhadj, for example, was the emir to an al Qaeda affiliate called Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Belhadj was...

Meeting in Rome with Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, Secretary of State John Kerry announced Thursday that the United States would provide an additional $100 million in humanitarian assistance for refugees fleeing the fighting in Syria, bringing the total amount of aid to $510 million. Kerry also said that he is working to bring all parties together to create a transitional government and that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would not be part of that government. Jordan, which is being inundated by a wave of Syrian refugees, will receive nearly $43 million, which will support United Nations humanitarian programs in the...

Kurt Schlichter notes that conservatives have been vindicated quite often in the past several weeks: Kurt Schlichter @KurtSchlichter Things Conservatives Have Been Proven Right About Lately: ☑ Benghazi; ☑ Pigford;☑ Obamacare; ☑ IRS. Next up: The immigration reform scam. 6:43 PM - 10 May 2013 357 Retweets 90 favorites I suspect that list will grow longer. The common thread in each of these scandals is corruption and a willingness to abuse the expanded powers of big government--while failing to carry out the most basic responsibilities of any government. In Benghazi, Obama a) failed to take action to save American diplomats...

The United States has become a tool of Muslim Brotherhood expansionism. Obama helped the Brotherhood overthrow governments by political means, but now the Brotherhood is demanding military intervention to help a Brotherhood/Al Qaeda coalition take over Syria. And if Obama goes along with it, he will have turned the United States military into the mercenaries of the Muslim Brotherhood. Americans have died because of Obama’s dirty deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. The question now is whether Obama will send American soldiers and pilots to die for the Brotherhood. In the spring of 2009, Obama went down to Cairo. Obama had...

Israel has no right to exist, a radical Muslim cleric visiting Gaza declared on Thursday, encouraging rocket attacks on the Jewish State. Yusuf al-Qaradawi warned that nobody was allowed to cede “any part of Palestine” during his visit to the Hamas-controlled region, according to AFP. “No one is allowed to give up any part of Palestine,” the Egyptian-born Qardawi said during a meeting with Gaza’s prime minister Ismail Haniyeh and members of the government. Qaradawi, who is a citizen of Qatar and close to the Muslim Brotherhood, was heading of a delegation of 50 clerics from 14 countries. “Palestine was...

WASHINGTON: The problems that plague the Middle East, including Iran's nuclear ambitions and Syria's civil war, require "political, not military" solutions, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday. Saying the "old order" was vanishing in the region, Hagel stressed in a speech that the United States would work to promote democratic reform while bearing in mind the "limitations" of American power. Although the Pentagon chief made clear that Washington had not ruled out potential military action against Iran or Syria, his remarks highlighted President Barack Obama's cautious stance on resorting to armed force in the volatile region. He said that...

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) on Monday introduced a bill that would provide arms to vetted rebel groups. Menendez’s legislation would give arms and military training to opposition groups that had been vetted, as well as provide $250 million for basic services and security in a post-Assad Syria. The bill also includes new sanctions against those providing arms or oil to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime. Menendez’s bill comes as the Obama administration is reconsidering its opposition to providing arms to the Syrian rebels.

Pathetic. Last year Barack Obama repeatedly warned that chemical weapons use by the Syrian regime against its own people would be a “game changer.” But since evidence was found that the Assad regime used chemical weapons so far Obama has not acted. Today he blamed Bush for his inaction. “We have evidence that there has been the use of chemical weapons inside Syria. But, I don’t make decisions based on ‘perceived.’ And, I can’t organize coalitions around ‘perceived.’ We tried that in the past, by the way, and it didn’t work out well.” It’s Bush’s fault.

With each new revelation, what has always been obvious becomes more pronounced: the State Department’s self-proclaimed final word on the Benghazi Massacre, the risibly named “Accountability Review Board” investigation, is a fraud. Yet, like the rest of the Obama administration’s obstructive wagon-circling, the ARB’s report continues serving its intended purpose: to thwart efforts to hold administration officials accountable. Even on Fox News, which has been admirably dogged covering a scandal the Obamedia has done its best to bury, the refrain is heard: How could the ARB report be a whitewash when its investigation was run by such Washington eminences as...

When Pakistani voters go to the polls later this week, the choice they face includes parties tainted by corruption allegations and those led by politicians appealing to anti-Western sentiment. The man favored to become Pakistan’s next prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, on Saturday called into question the U.S.-backed campaign by the Pakistani military against Taliban insurgents in the country. “I think guns and bullets are always not the answer to such problems,” Sharif, a former two-term prime minister who was overthrown in a 1999 military coup led by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, told the Reuters wire service. In a separate interview with...

Israel needs to reach peace with the Palestinians to avoid becoming a binational state, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday. He stressed, however, that the core of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians was not territory, but rather a Palestinian unwillingness to recognize Israel’s legitimacy within any boundaries. Netanyahu’s comments at a meeting with top Foreign Ministry officials came amid signs of revived motion on the Palestinian track. He made similar comments during a meeting later in the day with five US congressmen, giving the impression that he was staking out a pre-negotiation position. “We’re engaged right now in an...

Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood’s epigrammatic founder, was never at a loss for the chilling turn of phrase. His rally cry, the Brotherhood’s signature pledge that “Jihad is our way” and “Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope,” is the soundtrack of the “Arab Spring.” It speaks for a region over two-thirds of whose putative liberty lovers prefer to kill apostates than to abide freedom of conscience. Their embrace of the very sharia chauvinism that ties together Banna, bin Laden, the Saudi royals, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev explodes the Western myth of the moderate Muslim majority. Yet the...

The Obama administration is quite worried about stereotyping Muslims as violence-prone terrorists. They fear that any acknowledgment that some Muslims commit acts of terror because they are religiously motivated (however twisted the terrorists' interpretation of Islam may be) is to encourage a backlash of intolerance (at best) and violence (at worst) against Muslim Americans. It's not crazy to worry about anti-Muslim violence. There have been vicious attacks on innocent Muslims. Last November, a Queens, N.Y., man was stabbed six times as he stood outside his mosque by an attacker who shouted "F------ Muslim, I'll kill you." In the wake of...

Two years ago today, SEAL Team Six sent Osama bin Laden on his way to Davy Jones’ Locker — but his Islamist terror machine is anything but sinking to the depths. It remains a vicious, global threat. Since Osama’s demise, the terror group’s strength has ebbed in some areas, but flowed strongly in others. Indeed, one current estimate concludes that al Qaeda affiliates and associates (i.e., groups, cells or operatives) are active in more than 30 countries (of some 190) on four continents. Including our continent. While we don’t yet know the whole story behind the Boston bombing, just last...

On April 22, two Orthodox bishops of Aleppo, Syria, were kidnapped by U.S.-supported Islamist fighters. Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Yohanna Ibrahim and Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Boulos Yaziji were kidnapped as they were returning from an attempt to obtain the release of two priests previously kidnapped. The priests, Father Michel Kayyal, an Armenian Catholic, and Father Maher Mahfouz, a Greek Orthodox, were kidnapped in February and still remain in the hands of the Islamist fighters the Western media refer to as “rebels.” In a Huffington Post article, Orthodox priest Peter-Michael Preble said of the two kidnapped bishops: “They were on a mission...

The Libyan militia group that the State Department hired to defend its embattled diplomatic mission in Benghazi had clear al-Qaida sympathies, and had prominently displayed the al-Qaida flag on a Facebook page for months before the deadly attack. That organization, the February 17th Martyrs Brigade, was paid by the U.S. government to provide security at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. But there is no indication the Martyrs Brigade fulfilled its commitment to defend the mission on Sept. 11, when it came under attack.

Prominent Egyptian activist Ahmed Douma was arrested and immediately referred to trial for allegedly insulting the country’s president in a TV interview, a prosecutor said Thursday. Douma is to stand trial on Sunday—less than a week after being arrested. He is the first prominent opposition activist to be tried on charges of insulting Islamist President Mohammed Morsi. There have been a myriad of complaints levied against journalists and TV personalities, including well-known satirist Bassem Youssef, for insulting Morsi. Rights groups say such charges restrict freedom of expression. …

It was largely overshadowed by the Boston bombing, but on April 18, Sen. John McCain gave what might have been an important speech at the Center for a New American Security. It was clearly aimed at rhetorically pushing back at the non-interventionist Rand Paul wing of the GOP, but at the end of the speech, McCain took things to a new level: ”[T]here are times these days,” he said, “when I feel that I have more in common on foreign policy with President Obama than I do with some in my own party.”

I mentioned this in the earlier Syria post but it’s worth repeating in light of WaPo’s bombshell this afternoon. A quote from this weekend’s NYT: “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.” What could go wrong?

Acting Deputy Spokesman Patrick Ventrell defended the State Department restricting access to Congress from lower-level staffers directly involved with the Benghazi investigation. Ventrell said that it was "appropriate" for the FBI and the Accountability Review Board to interview the Department employees but that Congress should only have access to their superiors. "Just as you wouldn’t have necessarily a soldier or troops called as witnesses, you have their superior officers, that’s the same practice for the State Department," Ventrell argued. Ventrell went on to say, "I think that these folks want to be able to continue their professional duties and activities,"...

Omerta is the Italian word for "humility." It was also the code of silence in the Mafia the breaking of which was punished severely. Apparently the Obama Administration has a similar code of silence. According to Fox news at least four career employees of the State Department and the CIA have been threatened not to talk by their superiors. Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistle-blowers, have been...

James Rosen on Special Report tonight said that the State Dept. is not providing ‘a process’ for lawyers, being retained by whistleblowers, to get classified information on Benghazi, as we reported earlier today. But not only are they interfering with the legal representation, Victoria Toensing, one of the attorneys representing the whistleblowers, says that they have clients in both the State Dept. and CIA who are being threatened that if they come forward their careers will be over.

The State Department is blocking local lawyer Victoria Toensing from representing whistleblowers on the 2012 Benghazi attacks, according to her legal partner and husband Joe DiGenova. Teonsing wants to represent such whistleblowers at the upcoming Congressional hearings about the Benghazi case. "The Department of State is refusing to grant clearances to Victoria and other people who want to represent the whistleblowers in an attempt to prevent the testimony," DiGenova said.

Egypt’s Islamist-led parliament on Wednesday pushed ahead with a law that could force into retirement many of the nation’s most senior judges, despite an uproar by the judiciary over fears the president’s allies want to control the courts. … The judiciary, with mostly secular-minded professional judges, is seen by many Egyptians as the one of the only remaining buffers against Islamists’ monopoly on power following the ouster of authoritarian ruler Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Since then, Islamist parties have swept elections and dominated legislative councils and the presidency. President Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood party counters that many judges are holdovers...

Whoa! Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Tzhokhar Tsarnaevso, made these shocking statements on CNN tonight: “If they are going to kill him. I don’t care. My oldest son is killed, so I don’t care. I don’t care if my youngest son is going to be killed today. I want the world to hear this. And, I don’t care if I am going to get killed too. And I will say Allahu Akbar!“ Are we all clear on that motive now?(VIDEO-AT-LINK)(Continued)

The mother of accused Boston Marathon bombers has continued to defend her two sons from her home in Dagestan, Russia, but if she attempts to return to the United States to bury her older son, or care for the boy that remains hospitalized, she could face arrest on an outstanding warrant for shoplifting. The clerk of the Natick District Court confirmed to ABC News that Zubeidat Tsarnaev, failed to appear at a court hearing on October 25, 2012 to resolve charges that she stole $1,600 worth of garments from a nearby Lord & Taylor department store. The family saga for...

A new documentary secretly filmed inside several of the 85 Islamic Sharia Law courts operating in Britain has exposed the systematic discrimination that many women are suffering at the hands of Muslim jurists. The documentary, Secrets of Britain's Sharia Courts, was filmed by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and was first aired on BBC Panorama, a long-running current affairs program, on April 8. The undercover investigation proves what has long been suspected: namely, that Sharia courts, which operate in mosques and houses across Britain, routinely issue rulings on domestic and marital issues according to Islamic Sharia law that are at...

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Tuesday unveiled a report on last's year attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that blames then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for lapses in security. The 46-page report by the five committees of jurisdiction concludes that reductions in security levels prior to the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were approved at the highest levels of the State Department, including by Clinton herself. The report also concludes that talking points from the intelligence community were altered to protect the State Department from criticism of inadequate security levels.

I'm not sure whether to believe it and neither, apparently, is Pete Williams. Watch the clip below. The carjacking victim seems to have told two different stories, first that he "escaped" from the Tsarnaevs and second that they let him go because he wasn't an American. The "escape" story smells like B.S. cooked up in the first flush of the victim's brush with death, but it's just as implausible that they let the guy go. They'd already bombed a marathon and murdered a cop in cold blood. They had no problem with killing, whether remotely or face to face, and...

Spare me the lectures. This isn’t about our attitudes toward Muslims, it’s about their attitudes toward us. Every time there is a Muslim attack against Americans, here or abroad, it unleashes another session of sensitivity training. It started Friday night when the president told us not to judge groups of people, and when the television anchors asked in wide-eyed bewilderment what the possible motive for last week’s terrorist attack could be. Well, if they don’t know, they’re the only ones. Some will pretend otherwise, but they will only be pretending. We don’t need another interfaith service with a prayer by...

<p>WASHINGTON – Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has called for jihadists in Syria to form an emirate there while militant Islamists associated with the Syrian opposition increasingly are getting money and weapons from the United States, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, according to report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.</p>

Exclusive: Joseph Farah shakes head at 'progressives' defending regressive Islamism Despite the collective hopes of the Big Media and government at all levels, the perps in the Boston Marathon bombings turned out to be … Muslims. It’s almost impossible to list all those who speculated and conjectured that this was the work of “right-wing extremists.” It would even be more difficult to chronicle all the wishful-thinkers who hoped and wished out loud that the terrorists would be “white guys.” What is the psychology that drives people to think in these terms? Or can it even be characterized as thinking? There...

Destroying America is big these days. Everyone wants to do it. Including retired UN bigwigs. Sure Obama is doing it pretty quickly, but what if we put the Destroy America bulldozer in gear and just rammed it forward while spouting absolutely insane ideas? To answer that question we have this proposal from the former director of the United Nations Population Division to make America the most populous country in the world. Sure you might be asking yourself, “Wait a minute. Is that a good thing. Why do we want to be the most populous country in the world?” But that’s...

MOSUL, Iraq, Apr 4 2013 (IPS) - Armoured vehicles and thousands of soldiers masked in black balaclavas guard the entrance to the city of Mosul, 350 kilometres northwest of Baghdad. Arriving here gives one the unmistakable feeling of entering a territory that is still under occupation – only this time, the Iraqi Federal soldiers, not the U.S. military, play the role of the occupying army, locals tell IPS. Once a key trading post on the fabled Silk Road, Iraq’s second largest city was known for centuries for its high quality marble, and for having revolutionised 18th century Parisian fashion through...

Exclusive: Joel Richardson notes Turkey official's flip-flop in support of neo-Ottomanism Turkish Foreign Minister Davutoglu calls for a new regional neo-Ottoman order For the past several years, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the chief architect of Prime Minister Erdogan’s ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party, has repeatedly denied the Turkish government’s regional “neo-Ottoman” plans. In 2009, Davutoglu determinedly repudiated all claims that he was leading Turkey back to the Ottoman era. Against the mounting charges made by various political analysts and journalists, the FM protested, “When others use [this term], I have always warned that we do not count it...

“Today he said in a speech that the United States of America and Canada, that’s the comparison you look for. You look to the Palestinians and the United States or the Palestinians and Israel; it’s the same relationship as the United States and CanadaThat is the most I mean, I apologize to first graders, but ..a first grader would make a better comparison than that. That is unbelievable. It shows the man has absolutely no idea what’s really going on,” Glenn said. “To equate the Palestinians, who are lobbing missiles over the border, to equate them to Canada is beyond...

Mark Levin points out, as he says Aaron Klein also noted today, that in Obama’s speech in Jerusalem today he quoted Saul Alinsky to his Israeli college audience, encouraging them to create the change they want to see and basically do and end-run around their leadership to make peace. But Mark Levin wonders, rhetorically of course, why Obama doesn’t quote James Madison in the Middle East, or Edmund Burke, or Moses or even Jesus? No, he choose to quotes Saul Alinsky. Mark Levin asks “what the hell is he doing there?” Listen to the full clip:

The map of the Middle East displayed in an Obama administration video released days before President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel shows the Jewish state dispossessed of substantial parts of its current territory, including its capital. The map of Israel, displayed repeatedly during the video, shows the Golan Heights, Jerusalem, northern Israel, and areas surrounding what is currently the West Bank as non-Israeli territory. The Golan Heights is shown as part of Syria; Jerusalem is shown as part of the West Bank; and northern Israel is shown as part of Lebanon. The itinerary on the White House website also implies...

Lars Hedegaard is a Danish journalist who has made his name denouncing Islam, which he describes as “a totalitarian system of thought” whose adherents “rape their own children.” Last month someone showed up at his door with a gun and fired a shot that missed him. It’s just what you would expect of those crazy Muslims, isn’t it? Except that in the aftermath, Hedegaard found Muslims across Denmark were conspicuously un-crazy. They did not applaud the assailant or excuse his motives. Instead they condemned the attack and upheld Hedegaard’s freedom to preach unhinged bigotry. … If you hear someone in...

Bombshell Obama Vetting: 1979 Newspaper Article By Valerie Jarrett's Father-In-Law Reveals Start Of Muslim Purchase Of U.S. Presidency... Why would Muslim oil billionaires finance and develop controlling relationships with black college students? Well, like anyone else, they would do it for self-interest. And what would their self-interest be? We all know the top two answers to that question: 1. a Palestinian state and 2. the advancement of Islam in America. The idea then was to advance blacks who would facilitate these two goals to positions of power in the Federal government, preferably, of course, the Presidency. And why would the...

New light is being shed on the 2001 anthrax attacks in a fascinating open letter to Ayman al Zawahiri of al Qaeda, written by a jihadi living in London. Numan Bin Uthman, a former leader of an armed Islamic group in Libya, provides yet more evidence that the global Islamic jihad movement is losing its resolve.  But the letter contains a startling admission. Uthman tells us of a conversation he had with al Qaeda leaders before the 9/11 attacks in which he urged them not to use WMD. From AKI News: Uthman also said that he had taken part in...

The path from believing in radical Islamist political ideology to plotting attacks in the homeland can be triggered by a number of factors, a new Congressional Research Service report finds. The report focuses on homegrown Islamic terrorism, which in itself is remarkable given the reluctance many in Washington have had to clearly naming a leading source of the terrorist threat. The title, "American Jihadist Terrorism: Combating a Complex Threat," uses the kind of language all-but-banned by the executive branch since 2008. Cabinet officials in the Obama administration have strained to avoid references to jihadist violence. But the Congressional Research Service...

Full headline: Before he was overthrown and killed, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi warned jihadists would conquer northern Africa During the dying days of his four decade rule, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi cast an ominous prophecy. If his regime fell, jihadists would subjugate northern Africa, inflicting widespread violence and terror. “Al-Qaeda considers all the people to be infidels,” Mr. Gaddafi declared in a speech weeks before NATO began its military intervention in Libya. “They deem all people their enemies. They know nothing but killing.” The Islamists would pour in from Afghanistan, Algeria, and Egypt, he warned, saying, “These are beasts with...

2pm (ET) LIVE: Investigation of Benghazi Attack

Nearly a year after Morocco was shocked by the suicide of a 16-year-old girl who was forced to marry her alleged rapist, the government has announced plans to change the penal code to outlaw the traditional practice. … A paragraph in Article 475 of the penal code allows those convicted of “corruption” or “kidnapping” of a minor to go free if they marry their victim and the practice was encouraged by judges to spare family shame. Last March, 16-year-old Amina al-Filali poisoned herself to get out of a seven-month-old abusive marriage to a 23-year-old she said had raped her. Her...

U.N experts returned from Tehran on Friday without sealing a long-sought deal that would restart a probe of suspicions that Iran worked on atomic arms, adding to doubts that upcoming separate talks between six world powers and the Islamic Republic will succeed in reducing fears about Iran's nuclear ambitions. Herman Nackaerts, who headed the team of International Atomic Energy Agency experts, said the two sides would meet again in the Iranian capital Feb. 12. But even if those talks make progress, they will come too late for an Iran-six nation meeting tentatively scheduled for the end of this month. …...