LaRouche: Congress Must Stop
Covering for Obama's Lies
by Nancy Spannaus and Jeffrey Steinberg
Nov. 19—"The failure of Congress to prosecute the crimes of the Obama Administration in relation to the Benghazi murders of American personnel, in effect, means those Congressmen are abetting treason against the United States," said Lyndon LaRouche in a statement Nov. 18.
"Because the policy which the British puppet Obama Administration carried out, and which led to those deaths, if continued, will lead us straight to World War III."
In fact, Congress, and especially the Democrats, are continuing to dither, at the same time that the Obama Administration, along with its collaborators in the British and Saudi monarchies, continues to provide massive support for the jihadi terrorists in Syria, many of whom in fact come from Libya. The same combination that brought us 9/11 One and Two, is now pushing to expand the process, knowing that Russia, in particular, will not capitulate to a "new Libya."
Hearings have been scheduled by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and both UN Amb. Susan Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are expected to testify, said Sen. Saxby Chambless (R-Ga.), the committee's ranking minority leader, on Fox News Sunday Nov. 18. But there are no plans for speeding up the timetable, despite the emergence of new damning evidence against the Administration.
The Petraeus Bombshell
Gen. David Petraeus (ret.), CIA director until Nov. 9, when he abruptly resigned, delivered explosive testimony in closed-door sessions before both the House and Senate intelligence committees on Nov. 16, that could bring down the Obama Presidency just weeks after Obama's narrow victory over Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
According to Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), a member of the House panel, who attended the classified testimony, Petraeus reported that the CIA knew from the day one, that the Sept. 11, 2012 armed attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya was a terrorist act, carried out by an al-Qaeda affiliated group, Ansar al-Sharia. What's more, according to King, Petraeus reported that a memo prepared by the CIA for the White House, days after the attack, had been watered down to remove its explicit references to al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Sharia that had been included in the original memo. Petraeus did not know, according to King, who had removed the explicit references to the terrorist groups, but he confirmed that the talking points used by both Ambassador Rice and President Obama were fundamentally different than the intelligence provided by the Agency.
Chambliss's report on the Petraeus closed-door testimony, during the Nov. 18 TV show, was more specific. He put it this way:
"It was kind of interesting, Chris [Wallace]. At the hearing we had on Thursday and Friday, we had every leader of the intelligence community there, including folks from the State Department, the FBI. Everybody there was asked, do you know who made these changes? And nobody knew. The only entity that reviewed the talking points that was not there was the White House.... What I do know is that every member of the intelligence community says that references to al-Qaeda were removed by somebody, and they don't know who."
On Sept. 16, five days after the attack in Benghazi that killed Amb. Chris Stevens and three other Americans, Rice went on five Sunday morning talk shows, and claimed that the attack on the mission was a spontaneous mob action, triggered by an obscure video slandering the Prophet Mohammed. She added, as support for her argument, that President Obama had "dismantled" al-Qaeda, thus implicitly eliminating that as a possibility. Days after Rice's TV appearances, President Obama also appeared on two national television shows, and later addressed the UN General Assembly with the same fraudulent account about the demonstration.
Throughout his campaign, President Obama had highlighted the killing of Osama bin Laden, and had claimed that he had wiped out the al-Qaeda threat. The Benghazi attack, as it is now understood, clearly demonstrated that the President was wrong in his claims that al-Qaeda had been crushed.
Obama is facing mounting pressure to provide a clear account of what he knew before, during, and after the Benghazi attack. The State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon have all released precise timelines of what they knew beforehand, and how they responded on the day of the Benghazi attack. These may or may not be accurate. So far, the President and his top White House aides have relied on denials.
Watergate Coming?
As the result of hundreds of pages of documents released by the State Department, it is clearly established that the Obama Administration knew, months in advance, that the security situation in Benghazi was out of control. At least two memos to Washington, signed by Ambassador Stevens, demanded increased security in Tripoli and Benghazi, but security in Libya for the American diplomatic and intelligence missions was actually drawn down in the weeks leading up to the attack.
A number of Republican lawmakers, led by Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), have demanded that the President and Rice provide a full accounting of how they came to lie to the American people about the Benghazi attack. When the Congress returns from Thanksgiving recess on Nov. 27, there will be calls for the creation of a select committee to probe every aspect of the Benghazi affair. This could be a Watergate moment for President Obama.
The Benghazi probe has been further complicated by the scandal that forced Petraeus's resignation from the CIA. While the ostensible reason was the revelation that he was having an extra-marital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, senior U.S. intelligence sources have proposed a deeper explanation. According to the sources, top officials of the CIA were furious at both Petraeus and Obama for pursuing a policy of drone assassinations, Islamic militants, reducing the CIA to an adjunct of the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command, and the President's weekly kill list sessions. In addition, the drone policy creates more jihadi militants than it eliminates.
According to one source, with the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey, and with U.S. forces scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan over the next two years, American intelligence operations throughout the Muslim world are a top priority, and the drone killings are making it impossible for U.S. agents and diplomats to function. The fear that Petraeus would militarize the CIA was the underlying issue behind his fall from grace, several sources insisted.
Adding to the drama is the fact that Obama has hinted that he may nominate Rice to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in his second administration. Republicans have zeroed in on Rice's lying TV performance, and vow to battle to block her nomination if the President decides to name her. The British-trained Rice is a leading advocate of "humanitarian interventionism," which is indistinguishable from the neoconservative policy of perpetual war and the end of national sovereignty.
