GOP dredges up Benghazi incident to impeach Obama
Obama would do well to contemplate the fate of Nixon, and reserve a half-hour of air time with the main television networks for some time in the next month. He could use this time to regretfully detail the extent of an attempted military coup coordinated with the November 2012 elections, and seeking to install Romney in the White House in defiance of the popular will. He could point out that the Benghazi incident was simply a key moment in the unfolding of this coup. They could then detail the large number of government officials, generals, admirals, members of Congress, pollsters, defense industry executives, and others who have been ousted or otherwise neutralized over the past several months, generally on grounds of sexual or financial malfeasance. Once the influence of this cabal is permanently liquidated, it will prove much easier for Obama to put a definitive end to the Afghanistan war, and to avoid a catastrophic US involvement in Syria. Otherwise common the current administration will face a series of catastrophic defeats culminating in impeachment.
The picture shows the damage inside the burnt US Consulate building in Benghazi on September 13, 2012, following an attack on the building on September 11, 2012.
The so-called US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya was in fact a CIA station with more than 50 personnel on hand to maintain liaison with the Al Qaeda death squads deployed by NATO intelligence in 2010 and 2011 for the purpose of overthrowing the Libyan government of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.
Zealously seeking issues to use against the Obama White House, the reactionary Republicans of the US House of Representatives last week once again dredged up the Benghazi incident of September 11, 2012 in the form of a full-blown media circus centering on hearings by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Congressman Darrell Issa.
Long deprived of foreign policy issues to exploit for political gain, and fearing the political backlash from their usual expedient of trying to start a new war, the Republican reactionaries are doing everything possible to create popular hysteria reminiscent of the final phases of the Watergate scandal four decades ago.
GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, desperately seeking to stave off a political challenge by Tea Party fanatics, says that a new Watergate is in the air. The troglodyte Senator Imhofe of Oklahoma is busily invoking the specter of Obama’s impeachment, a project in which he is joined by failed Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. House Speaker John Boehner wants to open a fishing expedition among the e-mails of the White House. The pseudo-libertarian Rand Paul has already announced that the Benghazi incident shows that Hillary Clinton, still the most likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, should never hold high public office again. Few indeed are the Republican congressmen who have not found a way to pop off about Benghazi.
These farnetications by themselves would be of limited interest, were it not for a recent change in the attitude of the controlled corporate media, reflecting in turn a shift in the attitude of the US ruling class towards the Obama regime. Up until now, harping on the Benghazi incident has tended to be limited to Fox News, controlled by the British Empire’s right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch, and a gaggle of extremist radio talk show hosts. But now, other propaganda channels have joined in: Cheryl Atkisson of CBS news is now working on the story full-time, and Jonathan Karl at ABC news is attempting to catch up. National Public Radio, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have developed new interest in a story they have long dismissed. For virtually the first time, Jay Carney’s daily White House press briefing is turning into a hostile confrontation, rather than a liturgy of adoration for Obama.
As predicted here several months ago, Obama is falling prey to the familiar destructive pattern of the second term: once an administration has been in power for four years, a backlog of abuse, scandals, corruption, and malfeasance builds up. The ruling financier oligarchy, always interested in weakening the office of the presidency, and anxious to keep the president on a short leash at a time when he otherwise might feel free to attempt new initiatives, has instructed its journalistic minions to increase the hostility to Obama. Obama himself has also helped to bring this moment about - by refusing to come forward with a job creation and economic recovery program for his second term, despite continued mass unemployment, by proposing to shift the cost of the Depression to the middle class and working families through his savage proposal to gouge the Social Security benefit by instituting the so-called Chained CPI, and also by an additional $400 billion in Medicare cuts. These are the third rail of American politics, and Obama has embraced them with reckless abandon.
For the average person, an understanding of Benghazi is made almost impossible by the accumulated lies and fictions of a dozen years of the fraudulent Global War on Terror. Dispense with the myths, and the underlying reality is brutally simple.
An October surprise that came early
The Benghazi incident of September 11, 2012 was an October surprise which arrived a few weeks early. Its goal was to help defeat Obama, and to install the Romney in the White House. (Interestingly, the name of Romney was never mentioned during the entire five-hour length of the Issa committee hearings.) There are tell-tale signs that the Benghazi incident was deliberately orchestrated by a cabal of generals and admirals favorable to Romney. Many of these flag officers have been removed from their posts over the past several months, but their ouster has generally been attributed to financial or sexual misdeeds. Even though Obama was primarily the target of the Benghazi incident, partisan Republicans are attempting anyway to blame him for, betting and Obama is too cowardly to go public with charges of what amounts to an attempted military coup in 2012. This is folly, since Obama’s inaction leaves much of the rogue military network intact and capable of striking again.
The so-called US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya was in fact a CIA station with more than 50 personnel on hand to maintain liaison with the Al Qaeda death squads deployed by NATO intelligence in 2010 and 2011 for the purpose of overthrowing the Libyan government of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. Hillary Clinton was interested in building up the US presence in Benghazi in order to handle the growing workload generated by the airlift and sealift involved in this operation. By September, 2012 NATO was in the process of transferring large numbers of these terrorist fighters, along with weaponry plundered from the arms depots of Colonel Qaddafi, into Syria -- with the goal of stoking a civil war against Assad government. This transfer was being accomplished by way of southern Turkey, which explains why Ambassador Stevens’ last official meeting was with a Turkish diplomat.
The Obama administration showed reckless disregard for probable political retribution when it embarked on a policy of systematically using Al Qaeda terrorists in the form of secret armies to destabilize and overthrow several regimes in the Arab world. Awareness of this colossal vulnerability may also explain why the Obama White House has been so reticent to provide basic information about the Benghazi incident.
Benghazi mission was moving terrorists from Libya to Syria
Security was lax at the Benghazi facility because Ambassador Stevens and his State Department and CIA colleagues had been working closely with the Libyan jihadis for many months on redeploying these fanatical fighters to the Syrian front. As I reported in 2011, the Benghazi-Derna-Tobruk corridor had been identified by the United States Army some years earlier as the world’s most productive breeding ground for suicide bombers destined for the conflict in Iraq. The US intelligence community had decided to mobilize those fighters for the overthrow first of Qaddafi, and then of Assad.
