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Benghazi Witnesses: Obama Admin. Let Americans Die for Politics

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Photo Credit: AFP/Getty ImagesBy Oren Dorell. Testimony from three State Department “whistleblowers” scheduled to appear at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday will show that politics played a role from the start in the government’s handling of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, a Republican lawmaker says.

The hearing will explore why the State Department never activated its Foreign Emergency Support Team, a unit made up of security and intelligence professionals who specialize in responding to crises, said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.

Chaffetz believes the reason is that activating the team, whose members have connections to the CIA and the military, would have labeled the attack “a terrorist activity,” which then-secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department did not want to do.

“They didn’t want the political label of a terrorist attack,” said Chaffetz, who heads the national security subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is holding Wednesday’s hearing.

“Early on in this fight these people made a critical bad decision in that they did not activate these people simply because they were afraid it would be labeled as terrorism. It was pure politics.” Read more from this story HERE.

Benghazi Whistle-Blower Witnesses are “Terrified” of State Department

By Cheryl K. Chumley. Rep. Jason Chaffetz said the witnesses who are due to testify on Benghazi, Libya, on Wednesday have been intimidated by the Obama administration to such degree that they’re terrified.

“There are people who want to testify that have been suppressed,” he said, during a Fox News appearance on Sunday. “They’re scared to death of what the State Department is doing with them.” Read more from this story HERE.

Benghazi Investigation May Turn Into Impeachment Proceedings, if House Believes Whistle-Blowers

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The news from the Benghazi whistle-blowers is starting to create the type of firestorm that could spell the beginning of the end of the Obama Administration.

Among the shocking revelations from Rep. Darrell Issa on Face the Nation this weekend, Gregory Hicks, the senior Foreign Service Official at the US embassy in Tripoli, stated that Ambassador Stevens called and told him personally that they were under attack, NOT under siege by demonstrators.

Hicks insisted that he knew from the beginning that the attack was a terrorist attack and he “reported an attack on the consulate.”

And Hicks wasn’t the only one. According to CBS, embassy personnel repeatedly asked,

“Send reinforcements!”

But they were told immediate help wasn’t available.

Embassy personnel say they repeatedly asked the Defense Attache on site in Tripoli for military assistance.

“Isn’t there anything available?” one Embassy official says he asked. “But the answer was ‘no.'”

“What about Aviano?” the official pressed, referencing the NATO air base with US assets in northeastern Italy. “No,” was the answer.

The whistle-blowers that came forward with these firsthand accounts continue to be exposed to intimidation and “threats of retaliation.”

Americans are getting sick and tired of this Administration’s lies, whether they’re about the supposed Benghazi reaction to a stupid YouTube video, or the lies told in an attempt to cover-up Obama’s and Hillary’s responsibility for the fiasco.

So let’s hope the truth comes out in this week’s hearings. Assuming the testimony is consistent with what we’ve heard from the whistle-blowers so far, the House should seriously consider impeachment proceedings. Any president that consciously turns his back on Americans in conflict, when he has available resources and no national security reason to remain passive, must be held to the highest account.

Retired FBI Counter-Terrorism Agent Confirms NSA Whistle-Blowers: Feds are Recording All Cell Phone Conversations (+videos)

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During an interview with CNN this past week, a retired FBI counter-terrorism agent let it slip that the U.S. government is recording all cell phone conversations.

The interview concerned the FBI’s investigation of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow, Katherine Russell, and what, if anything, she knew about the Boston Marathon bombings. The CNN panel speculated on the FBI’s efforts to determine if Russell were a part of the conspiracy.

The CNN host, Erin Burnett, thinking that the feds could gain access to Russell’s old voice mails but couldn’t actually listen to her old phone calls, observed, “there’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them.”

The former agent, Tim Clemente, disagreed:

No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

Burnett knew immediately that Clemente was referring to Russell’s old phone calls and asked incredulously, ” So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.”

Clemente answered, “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

The former counter-terrorism agent’s revelation is not the first time former federal officials have admitted that Washington is engaged in extensive warrantless surveillance of all US citizens. This past fall, NSA whistle-blower William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the NSA was widely interviewed about his work that allowed federal agencies to conduct near-universal surveillance of digital communications.

In his interviews, Mr. Binney voiced sincere regret for his contribution to this Orwellian eavesdropping program, noting that he intended it for use internationally, not domestically:

Additionally, in a federal court case several weeks ago, the FBI admitted to the use of another warrantless tool that selectively targeted cell phone conversations and revealed the participants’ locations.

And Congress seems to be going right along with it. In March, experts testified before the House arguing that federal law should be changed to explicitly permit the permanent storage of virtually all of Americans’ text messages and emails.

When considering this along with the existing federal ability to track almost all credit card transactions and banking transactions, the aggressive IRS efforts to track everyone’s “digital footprints,” and many other warrantless federal intrusions into our privacy, all liberty-loving Americans should demand that their elected leaders reign in the massive surveillance state.

We have little time to turn this around. The enormous, unlawful power that the central government is accumulating is a real threat to the constitutional freedoms entrusted to us by our Founders.

Obama Admin. Threatening Benghazi Whistle-Blowers at CIA, State

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Photo Credit: Jonathon NarveyAt least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.

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 threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.

“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”

Toensing declined to name her client. She also refused to say whether the individual was on the ground in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, when terrorist attacks on two U.S. installations in the Libyan city killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the attacks: the months that led up to the attack, when pleas by the ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time frame in which the attacks unfolded, and the eight-day period that followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials incorrectly described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.

Read more from this story HERE.

Have You Heard About the Quietly-Released Obama Memo on ‘Insider Threat Policy’?

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In what some might consider an increasingly growing trend of releasing information just before holidays or the late on Friday afternoon, the White House has yet again quietly published a memo from President Barack Obama, laying out guidelines for executive agencies to establish “effective insider threat programs.”

The presidential memorandum issued on Nov. 21 — the day before Thanksgiving — is called “National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs.” Here’s what the relatively short memo said (Note: Emphasis added):

“This Presidential Memorandum transmits the National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs (Minimum Standards) to provide direction and guidance to promote the development of effective insider threat programs within departments and agencies to deter, detect, and mitigate actions by employees who may represent a threat to national security. These threats encompass potential espionage, violent acts against the Government or the Nation, and unauthorized disclosure of classified information, including the vast amounts of classified data available on interconnected United States Government computer networks and systems.

The Minimum Standards provide departments and agencies with the minimum elements necessary to establish effective insider threat programs. These elements include the capability to gather, integrate, and centrally analyze and respond to key threat-related information; monitor employee use of classified networks; provide the workforce with insider threat awareness training; and protect the civil liberties and privacy of all personnel.

The resulting insider threat capabilities will strengthen the protection of classified information across the executive branch and reinforce our defenses against both adversaries and insiders who misuse their access and endanger our national security.”

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA whistleblowers: Feds spying on every single American

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Testimonies delivered in recent weeks by former employees of the National Security Agency suggest that the US government is granting itself surveillance powers far beyond what most Americans consider the proper role of the federal government.

In an interview broadcast on Current TV’s “Viewpoint” program on Monday, former NSA Technical Director William Binney commented on the government’s policy of blanket surveillance, alongside colleagues Thomas Drake and Kirk Wiebe, the agency’s respective former Senior Official and Senior Analyst.

The interview comes on the heels of a series of speeches given by Binney, who has quickly become better known for his whistleblowing than his work with the NSA. In their latest appearance this week, though, the three former staffers suggested that America’s spy program is much more dangerous than it seems.

In an interview with “Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer, Drake said there was a “key decision made shortly after 9/11, which began to rapidly turn the United States of America into the equivalent of a foreign nation for dragnet blanket electronic surveillance.”

These powers have previously defended by claims of national security necessity, but Drake says that it doesn’t stop there. He warns that the government is giving itself the power to gather intel on every American that could be used in future prosecutions unrelated to terrorism.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey