In mid-April, Washington and Moscow each published blacklists of suspected human rights violators in the other's jurisdiction. The moves were rife with symbolism, and clear signs of a deteriorating bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Russia. But while it is clearly essential to make real efforts to promote human rights, using what appears to be politicized sanctions to secure them might not be the best strategy.
These moves, however, aren't likely to be effective. Governments generally use travel bans and blacklists to influence or constrain the behavior of corporations, individuals and countries. Sanctions have traditionally had an impact in three areas: slowing foreign investment in designated jurisdictions; curbing the ability of illicit actors to gain access to global financial markets; and providing a clear statement of concern. They have been especially effective against rogue regimes, transnational crime syndicates and terrorists, although their efficacy is often difficult to determine with precision. The United States and Europe have in recent years relied heavily on sanctions to push their national security agendas, especially in regard to Iran and North Korea.
But if lawmakers in Washington and Moscow aimed to accomplish any of these three goals, they have certainly failed in two of these areas, and perhaps all three. Neither power, especially the United States, has wanted to comprehensively tackle the issue of human rights for fear of complicating other foreign policy agendas in which each has an important role to play in the national security of the other. These include Afghanistan, Iran and Syria, and issues such as curbing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and transnational crime.
Addressing human rights abuses and fostering a public debate on the best way to secure freedom is critical. Blacklisting a few public officials raises limited awareness, but it antagonizes the country whose officials are blacklisted and does not have a sufficient impact. If the White House and Kremlin do wish to deal with the issue comprehensively, they will need to issue sweeping blacklists and take a firm stance on the importance of freedom and human rights.
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3)Gore Is Romney-Rich With $200 Million After Bush Defeat
By Ken Wells & Ari Levy
In 1999,
Al Gore, then U.S. vice president and a Democratic candidate for president, sold $6,000 worth of cows.
The former senator, who spent most of his working life in Congress, had a net worth of about $1.7 million and assets that included pasture rents from a family farm and royalties from a zinc mine, remnants of his rural roots in Carthage, Tennessee. Funds from the cattle sale went to three of his kids, according to federal disclosure forms filed as part of his presidential run.
Fourteen years later, he made an estimated $100 million in a single month. In January, the Current TV network, which he helped to start in 2004, was sold to Qatari-owned
Al JazeeraSatellite Network for about $500 million. After debt, he grossed an estimated $70 million for his 20 percent stake, according to people familiar with the transaction.
Two weeks later, Gore exercised options, at $7.48 a share, on 59,000 shares of
Apple Inc. stock that he’d been granted for serving on the Cupertino, California-based company’s board since 2003. On paper, it was about a $30 million payday based on the company’s share price on the day he claimed the options.
That’s a pretty good January for a guy who couldn’t yet call himself a multimillionaire when he briefly slipped from public life after his bitterly contested presidential election loss to
George W. Bush in late 2000, based on 1999 and 2000 disclosure forms.
Gore isn’t finished exercising his Apple stock grants. Those 59,000 are part of 101,358 Apple
options and shares of restricted stock Gore has amassed, according to company filings, giving his total holdings a gross value of more than $45.6 million today.
Nobel Prize
Albert Arnold Gore Jr., 65, is a lot of things to a lot of people. Among friends and fans, he’s the progressive Democrat who should have been president, visionary author and Internet prophet, the man who more than anyone drove
climate change to the center of public consciousness.
Detractors see Gore as a limousine liberal, tiresome pedant and climate alarmist who lives a jet-setting, carbon-profligate lifestyle while preaching asceticism for everyone else.
His work and writing on global warming have earned him a share of a Nobel Prize as well as a South Park cartoon parody in which he tries to scare school kids to his beliefs with a fictitious global-warming surrogate monster known as ManBearPig.
Whatever you think of Gore, one thing is indisputable: leveraging his aura as a technology seer and his political and climate work connections, Gore has remade himself into a wealthy businessman, amassing a fortune that may exceed $200 million.
Romney Wealth
That’s close to the $250 million net worth of 2012 Republican presidential nominee
Mitt Romney, whom President
Barack Obama and Democrats targeted in ads and speeches as being out of touch with most Americans.
Gore declined to be interviewed for this story. Estimates of his wealth are based on company filings, government records, public pronouncements he or his associates have made about past business dealings and interviews with people in a position to know of and evaluate Gore’s holdings.
How Gore achieved this is as much about timing and luck as it is about business skills. His Apple board tenure has coincided with a 5,900 percent increase in its stock price. Current TV was a moribund “fixer-upper” when Al Jazeera stepped in to buy it at “a huge valuation,” said Derek Baine, an SNL Kagan cable analyst in Monterey, California.
Gore also had his share of flubs, most of them in his efforts at green-tech investing. An investment firm he helped to start took stakes in two carbon-trading firms that fizzled and also racked up tens of millions in losses in a solar-module maker.
Diving In
The wealth accumulation attests to Gore’s ability, particularly among technology companies and rich political progressives, to attract moneyed and skilled people to do deals with him or seek his paid counsel.
This may be in part because Gore, by reputation, shuns figurehead appointments for real ones. One example: at Apple’s request, he dove into an options backdating scandal, which predated his arrival, chairing a 2006 committee that recommended revisions to company policies.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Reed Hundt, a Gore high-school friend, said of his business success.
Hundt, whom Gore helped get appointed to run
Bill Clinton’s Federal Communications Commission in 1993, didn’t detect a business gene in young Al back in their days at Washington’s private St. Albans School.
Gore went on to graduate with a degree in government from Harvard University, dabble in journalism and study but never graduate from law school at Vanderbilt University. Instead, he quit to run for public office.
‘Going Places’
Still, says Hundt, “it was clear that Al was smart and was going places.”
Gore hasn’t tried to hide his prosperity. Back in 2000, about $750,000 of his net worth was tied to two homes he and his then-wife Tipper owned in Virginia and Tennessee.
Most of the rest had been recently inherited, including an undisclosed number of shares of Occidental Petroleum Corp. left to him by his late father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., and valued at between $500,000 and $1 million, according to disclosure forms.
He’s moved up the housing ladder since then. He owns a 20- room, 10,000-square-foot antebellum mansion in Nashville’s wealthy Belle Meade neighborhood that’s mostly shrouded from view by a thicket of Southern foliage and a massive iron gate. In 2010 -- weeks before the Gores announced they were dissolving their 40-year marriage -- he purchased an oceanfront six- bedroom, $8.9 million villa in Montecito, California, where
Oprah Winfrey and Kirk Douglas have lived.
Utility Bill
It isn’t clear how the divorce affects Gore’s net worth. No settlement has ever been published and Betsy McManus, Al Gore’s director of communications, declined to comment on it.
Such lavish living isn’t lost on Gore’s critics. In 2007, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, using a public records request, published Gore’s Nashville home utility bill, showing it used almost 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006 -- 20 times the national average household consumption. Gore’s people dismissed the revelation.
His ascent into America’s 1 percent happened quickly. After losing to Bush, he had enough wealth by March 2008 to put $35 million into hedge funds and private partnerships through Capricorn Investment Group, a Palo Alto, California-based company, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents.
The investment company was founded by his buddy, Canadian billionaire Jeffrey Skoll, who amassed a large part of his fortune in shares he was awarded as the first president of EBay Inc.
Book Profits
His best-selling climate books, “Earth in the Balance,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Assault on Reason,” haven’t contributed to his wealth. Gore has long pledged any book and film money to his nonprofit, the Climate Reality Project, created in 2011 from two advocacy groups Gore founded a year earlier.
By the time of the Capricorn investment, he was already starting to rake in cash from Generation Investment Management - - a fund that incorporates “sustainability” into its investment approach. Gore co-founded GIM in 2004 with former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Managing Director David W. Blood.
Public filings show that in 2008 through 2011 London-based GIM racked up almost 140 million pounds ($218 million) in profits to be split among its 26 partners.
Gore and Blood as founders are thought to have the largest equity stakes. GIM doesn’t disclose partnership equity or how the partners split profits, said Richard Campbell, a spokesman.
Prosperous Enterprises
Gore had a string of connections and invitations to join what would turn out to be prosperous enterprises. Skoll’s Participant Media produced the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” based on Gore’s climate work. The movie was pivotal in helping him win his share of the 2007 Nobel and claim speaker fees at $175,000 a pop.
Prior to being invited to join Apple’s board, Gore was tapped as a senior adviser to
Google Inc. (GOOG) before its 2004 initial public offering and at a time when it was not yet a household word. Google won’t discuss his duties or compensation though some in Silicon Valley believe his pay there may be as rich as his Apple remuneration, which that company is required to disclose because he’s a director.
Kleiner Perkins
Blood joined with Gore after he was among the original 221 Goldman partners who got shares in that company’s 1999 IPO. Blood’s 0.66 percent stake, based on valuations at the time, was thought to be worth about $100 million.
Blood lived with his family in Brazil as a youngster and has said he was distressed by the extreme poverty there. Gore’s notion of “sustainable capitalism” appealed to Blood, who also declined to be interviewed for this story.
In November 2007, GIM announced a partnership with Silicon Valley venture capital company
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, to join its green-investing efforts. The goal, according to a joint press release at the time, was to create “a global collaboration to find, fund and accelerate green business, technology and policy solutions with the greatest potential to help solve the current climate crisis.”
Gore was made a partner at Kleiner Perkins and
John Doerr, an early investor in Amazon.com Inc., Intuit Inc. and Google, joined GIM’s advisory board. At Kleiner Perkins, Gore helps with investment strategies and selectively advises companies but doesn’t lead deals or take board seats on startups the firm invests in. Kleiner Perkins declined to discuss his compensation.
Green Blemishes
Investing on behalf of its clients, GIM has put $50 million to $100 million in KPCB’s $1 billion green growth fund, according to two people with knowledge of the amount who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to speak about it.
While Kleiner Perkins doesn’t publish fund results, its green fund hasn’t had unblemished success.
Along with potential winners like Bloom Energy, a fuel-cell maker, and Nest Labs Inc., a thermostat company, Kleiner Perkins also backed Miasole Inc., a solar-panel maker that was bought for a reported $30 million after raising at least $494 million from investors, and Fisker Automotive Inc., the electric-car maker that fired three-quarters of its staff last month.
Well Versed
Gore earns his keep in Silicon Valley beyond simply attending the annual holiday party. He’s made himself available to a number of technology companies that got startup help from Kleiner Perkins.
Andrew Fisher, chairman of Shazam Entertainment Ltd., a mobile music app maker backed by Kleiner Perkins, said Gore flew to London two years ago and agreed to be interviewed on stage in front of about 200 company employees and business partners.
Gore’s preparation was first rate and it was clear that “he’s tremendously well-versed” in Kleiner Perkins’s investments, Fisher said. At the presentation, “he talked about his work around the environment, leadership in small companies, decision making, sitting on the board of Apple. People were fascinated with his insight.”
Gore paid a similar visit last year to a recycling plant in Vancouver run by Harvest Power Inc., one of Kleiner Perkins’s clean-tech companies.
Shopkick Visit
Eric Feng, former Hulu LLC chief technology officer and ex- Kleiner Perkins employee, described Gore as an energized and active participant in investment decisions who is “very well- respected among the partners.” He’s regularly asked for feedback on investments and is considered “a very valuable resource,” Feng said.
Shopkick Inc. Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Cyriac Roeding met Gore about two years ago at Kleiner Perkins. As a guru on climate change, Roeding figured Gore was unlikely to have much interest in Shopkick’s technology, which helps retailers target customers with discounts.
“I took a photo with him because I thought I’d never see him again,” Roeding says.
He was wrong. In February 2012, Gore joined Roeding at the Village Pub in Silicon Valley -- the same place where
Mark Zuckerberg was famously courted by Accel Partners’
Jim Breyer -- for an intimate event with about 35 executives from top retailers like Macy’s Inc., Crate & Barrel and Target Corp. In a fireside chat, Gore answered every question Roeding threw his way and showed a deep knowledge of Shopkick’s market.
Internet Invention
“I had not planned on talking about Shopkick, but he just kept coming back to it,” Roeding says. “He talked about how the future of the physical world is converging with the digital world.”
They love Al Gore in Silicon Valley and why shouldn’t they? Gore never claimed, as some conservative critics have asserted, to have invented the Internet.
Still, as a Tennessee congressman and senator, he was the first national politician to see how personal computers connected to a system he popularized as the “information superhighway” would radically change the social and commercial landscape of the U.S. and the world.
He drafted the Performance Computing Act of 1991, often called the Gore Bill, which led to funding to build the system that later became the Internet.
Luck and Timing
None of this was lost on Apple when, in March 2003,
Steve Jobs personally asked Gore to join the board. An Apple press release about the appointment was a techie love fest. “Al is an avid Mac user and does his own video editing in Final Cut Pro,” Jobs said.
Apple was trading at about $7.50 a share when Gore accepted the Apple board seat. The company’s stock closed at $449.98 on May 3 in New York. The escalation of his options alone would have made him rich.
Gore’s profiting from the Al Jazeera sale is another example of luck, timing or both. Gore and partners that included Los Angeles billionaire
Ron Burkle, Hyatt Legal Services founder
Joel Hyatt and
San Francisco money manager Richard Blum bought the predecessor company for $70 million in 2004.
Re-launched as Current TV, Gore said at the time he wanted to create a “transformational” network. It would, like YouTube, thrive on youthful viewer input, be an antidote to Fox News and a liberal competitor to
MSNBC.
Olbermann Suit
Instead, Current failed to make much of an impact at all while Gore was paying himself $1.2 million a year in salary and bonuses, according to 2008 SEC documents filed as part of a proposed public offering that was later withdrawn. Meanwhile, Time Warner Cable Inc., which carried the network and accounted for about 9 million of its subscribers, made noises about dropping Current from its listings along with other “low- rated” networks.
In 2011, Current attempted to remake itself by bringing in Keith Olbermann, the former anchor of MSNBC’s Countdown program. The relationship quickly devolved into a public relations disaster. Olbermann, who had signed what was reported to be a five-year, $50 million contract, was fired in March 2012. Accusations and lawsuits flew.
Current, in an April 6, 2012, breach-of-contract suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accused Olbermann of waging a campaign to “undermine” the network by, among other things, taking unauthorized days off, leaking the terms of his contract to the media and failing to lead Current’s 2012 primary election coverage as he was asked to do.
‘Immediate Interest’
Olbermann, in his own lawsuit, painted an ugly picture of the Gore-anointed management team. Current, while promising to deliver “a high-caliber political commentary show,” turned out to be amateur hour with Gore and co-founder Hyatt “no more than dilettantes portraying entertainment industry executives.”
Olbermann had asked the court to award him as much as $70 million. The two parties reached a settlement in March for terms that weren’t disclosed.
The sale to Al Jazeera drew a lawsuit from media consultant John Terenzio who said putting the two networks in touch was his idea and he’s owed money.
Terenzio said he sent an intermediary to see Current investor Richard Blum under a supposition that “in light of Current’s well-publicized financial woes, its principals might be interested in selling the struggling network.”
Blum, according to the lawsuit, “expressed immediate interest” in hearing Terenzio’s proposal, explaining that “he and other Current investors were concerned about the prospect of losing their shirt in financially troubled Current.” Blum, Al Jazeera and Current declined to comment on the lawsuit.
‘Mogul Al’
The transaction also raised eyebrows because Gore, who has for years inveighed against fossil fuels and their role in climate change, sold the network to a company funded in part by oil-rich Qatar.
Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show television program, asked in January, “Can mogul Al Gore coexist with activist Al Gore?”
Gore defended the sale on the grounds that, among other things, Al Jazeera has “the highest quality, most extensive, best climate coverage of any network in the world.” It’s a position Gore’s been forced to defend repeatedly along the tour for his latest book “The Future: the Six Drivers of Global Change.”
Cable TV analysts, meanwhile, were abuzz over the $500 million payout. Current had been seeking buyers for a while, aware that Time Warner might soon pull the plug, but had not found any takers until Al Jazeera stepped forward.
‘High Price’
“It seems like a really high price to me,” SNL’s Baine said. “It’s hard to sell a fixer-upper. From the beginning Current had a programming strategy that hadn’t worked and they changed it over and over and it still didn’t work. Honestly, not a lot of people had ever heard of it.”
Al Jazeera might have been desperate enough to get into the U.S. market to pay that kind of a premium since it’s still cheaper to buy a network than it is to build one from scratch, he said.
“To be locked out of one of the world’s biggest markets is a problem for them,” Blaine said. Al Jazeera, while declining to comment on the price, has said it intends to hire about 100 journalists in New York and Washington for its rebranded channel.
The deal had no sooner been announced than Time Warner Cable said it was in fact pulling the plug on Current “as quickly as possible” and wouldn’t carry the rebranded Al Jazeera channel over its U.S. distribution system.
Meanwhile, Gore’s “sustainable” GIM investing company has seen its philosophy of buying stocks and holding for the long term tested at times.
Blood and Gore
Blood and Gore, as the company is sometimes known, eschews “the dominance of short-termism in the market” which “fosters general market instability and undermines the efforts of executives seeking long-term value creation,” the two men wrote in an 2011 op-end in the Wall Street Journal.
GIM’s roster of publicly traded U.S. holdings include successful, albeit not particularly green, companies like Amazon, EBay, Procter & Gamble Co. and Colgate-Palmolive Co. A few of the others would count in GIM parlance as green or at least sustainable investments, such as Solarcity Corp., a rooftop solar installer, and Blackbaud Inc., a software maker that helps nonprofits raise money.
Green Investing
GIM has assets under management of about $8.5 billion. Its investment strategy and returns have been impressive enough that Britain’s Environment Agency asked it to manage 7.2 percent of its 1.6 billion-pound investment portfolio through 2014. That’s up from 4.8 percent in 2009, according to documents filed with Britain’s securities regulator.
At times the company’s green investing approach hasn’t worked. In 2008, with optimism that a Democrat-controlled Congress would establish carbon controls and an international climate treaty would be extended, GIM bought a 9.6 percent stake, in Camco International Ltd., a manager of projects that reduce greenhouse gases.
By early 2010, GIM had upped its stake in the company now known as Camco Clean Energy Plc to 18.6 percent, according to documents. By October of that year, with Republicans in the House saying no to climate legislation and Kyoto Protocol talks stalled, shares in Camco were taking a beating. GIM dumped its stake. Neither company would comment on GIM’s actions.
Climate Exchange
In another instance, GIM took a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, set up in 2003 by former derivatives guru Richard Sandor to take advantage of what the exchange’s founders hoped would be a government-mandated price on carbon. The exchange ran into the same headwinds as Camco and was sold to Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange Inc. in May 2010 for $581 million. It was later shut as carbon prices fell to all- time lows.
GIM would only say that neither Camco nor Chicago Climate Exchange were profitable investments.
If emissions limits had been approved by Congress, both Camco and the exchange stood to rake in huge profits, said Dan Kish, vice president for policy with the Washington-based Institute for Energy Research, which gets funding from oil and natural gas companies.
“Al Gore is like the preacher touting his moral purity and superiority,” Kish said. “Yet it turns out that heeding his preachings is directly linked to his financial interests.”
Besides its losing investments in Camco and Chicago Climate Exchange, GIM also bailed out of First Solar Inc., a solar-panel maker that, like bankrupt Solyndra LLC, got squeezed when cheap Chinese supplies began hitting the market in late 2010.
Democracy ‘Hacked’
According to SEC filings, GIM first began buying First Solar at $113 a share in the third quarter of 2010. GIM continued its buying for several more quarters even as the shares lost luster. When it was clear First Solar was truly tanking, GIM dumped its last lot in the second quarter of 2012.
It’s accumulated loss was $165.9 million, according to a Bloomberg calculation based on SEC filings.
Gore said in a May 1 interview with Bloomberg Television that American democracy has been “hacked” by the influence of money in politics and that he hopes activist investors will continue to exert influence on corporations globally to act in a responsible way.
During a 2009 House hearing, Tennessee Republican Representative Marsha Blackburn tackled Gore on the issue of whether he had become a “climate profiteer” by betting on companies that might hugely benefit from his advocacy. Gore’s response: “Congresswoman, if you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don’t know me.”
3a)Benghazi Whistleblower: I Reported Attack Was Terrorism 'From the Get-go'
The second-ranking U.S. official in Libya during last year’s deadly attack on the mission in Benghazi immediately considered it a terrorist attack rather than a spontaneous event, according to a transcript of his interview with congressional investigators.
“I thought it was a terrorist attack from the get-go,” Gregory Hicks, a foreign service officer and former deputy chief of Libyan operations, told investigators, according to excerpts of the interview displayed today on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program. “I never reported a demonstration, I reported an attack on the consulate.”
His account contrasted with comments made by Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, after the attack on Sept. 11, 2012. She said it grew out of a “spontaneous” demonstration against an anti-Islamic video that was “hijacked” by militants.
Hicks said he wasn’t contacted by State Department officials before Rice spoke on five Sunday talk shows Sept. 16, according to the interview with congressional investigators.
The Benghazi attack killed four Americans including Ambassador Christopher Stevens and became a flashpoint in last year’s presidential campaign. Republicans criticized officials including Rice for their early accounts of the circumstances.
Hicks is scheduled to testify at a May 8 hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, a California Republican, in a May 1 statement announcing the hearing, accused President Barack Obama’s administration of offering “a carefully selected and sanitized version” of the Benghazi attack.
The Accountability Review Board "report itself doesn’t really ascribe blame to any individual at all. The public report anyway," Hicks told investigators, according to transcript
excerpts obtained by CNN. "It does let people off the hook.
"In our system, people who make decisions have been confirmed by the Senate to make decisions," Hicks told investigators."The three people in the State Department who are on administrative leave pending disciplinary action are below Senate confirmation level. Now, the DS (Diplomatic Security) assistant secretary resigned, and he is at Senate confirmation level. Yet the paper trail is pretty clear that decisions were being made above his level."
Hicks specifically mentions Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy.
"Certainly the fact that Under Secretary Kennedy required a daily report of the personnel in country and who personally approved every official American who went to Tripoli or Benghazi, either on assignment or TDY (temporary duty), would suggest some responsibility about security levels within the country lies on his desk," Hicks said
, according to CNN.
Hicks also told his interrogators that he never had any indication that there had been a popular protest outside the mission in Benghazi.
"I never reported a demonstration; I reported an attack on the consulate," Hicks said. Stevens' "last report, if you want to say his final report, is, 'Greg, we are under attack.'"
Hicks doesn't hold back from slamming the Obama administration.
"You know, it's jaw‑dropping that ‑‑ to me that ‑‑ how that came to be," Hicks recalled, referring to the Obama administration's line that it was a spontaneous protest. "And, you know, I knew ‑‑ I was personally known to one of (U.S.) Ambassador (to the United Nations Susan) Rice's staff members. And, you know, we're six hours ahead of Washington. Even on Sunday morning, I could have been called, and, you know, the phone call could have been, 'hey, Greg, Ambassador Rice is going to say blah, blah, blah, blah,' and I could have said, 'no, that's not the right thing.' That phone call was never made."
CNN reported that Hicks then added that "for there to have been a demonstration on Chris Stevens' front door and him not to have reported it is unbelievable. And secondly, if he had reported it, he would have been out the back door within minutes of any demonstration appearing anywhere near that facility. And there was a back gate to the facility, and, you know, it worked."
Hicks stresses that despite being the senior diplomat in Libya after Stevens was killed, he wasn't consulted at all before Rice went on Sunday talk shows to discuss the attacks.
“Clearly there was a political decision to say something different than what was reasonable to say,” Issa said today on CBS.
Other potential witnesses with firsthand knowledge of the Benghazi attack have been “suppressed” by the administration, Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“There are people, more than one, that have felt intimidation from the State Department,” Chaffetz said.
An April 23 report by Republicans in the U.S. House said the Obama administration presented “misleading” talking points after the attack and removed references to the threat of extremists linked to al-Qaeda in eastern Libya, including information about at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi.
Shawn Turner, a spokesman for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, issued a Sept. 28 statement, 12 days after Rice’s appearances, saying the intelligence community had revised its initial assessment and concluded the assault was “a deliberate and organized terrorist attack.”
‘Scrubbed’ Report
Speaking today on “Fox News Sunday,” Representative Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat and member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said there was ’’no excuse’’’ for the administration’s talking points about the attacks.
“It was scrubbed. It was totally inaccurate,” he said. “It was false information.”
Asked whether Rice’s talking points were revised because an al-Qaeda attack didn’t fit with the 2012 Obama presidential campaign’s narrative that the terrorist group was on the run, Lynch said: “I think it was a victory of hope over reality, to be honest with you. They were hoping that this wasn’t the case.”
Still, Lynch said allegations of administration intimidation of potential witnesses were “completely false.”
Witnesses
In addition to Hicks, the witnesses scheduled to testify before Issa’s committee May 8 are Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for counterterrorism, and Eric Nordstrom, a diplomatic security officer who had been a regional security officer in Libya.
“They have critical information about what occurred before, during and after the Benghazi terrorist attacks that differs on key points from administration officials,” Issa said in a statement.
The Obama administration and congressional Democrats said Republicans are playing politics with the Benghazi incident.
“The politicization of this issue is unfortunate, and it continues unabated,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said at a May 1 briefing.
3b)Benghazi Whistleblower: Nearby Rapid-Reaction Troops Were Told to Stand Down
Obama and Hillary claimed there was no stand-down order and it was all a right-wing confabulation.
The deputy of slain U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens has told congressional investigators that a team of Special Forces prepared to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks was forbidden from doing so by U.S. Special Operations Command South Africa.
The account from Gregory Hicks is in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized. Hicks gave private testimony to congressional investigators last month in advance of his upcoming appearance at a congressional hearing Wednesday.
According to excerpts released Monday, Hicks told investigators that SOCAFRICA commander Lt. Col. Gibson and his team were on their way to board a C-130 from Tripoli for Benghazi prior to an attack on a second U.S. compound "when [Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, 'you can't go now, you don't have the authority to go now.' And so they missed the flight ... They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it."
No assistance arrived from the U.S. military outside of Libya during the hours that Americans were under attack or trapped inside compounds by hostile forces armed with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and AK-47 rifles.
The left now has an explanation as to why they screamed so furiously that all was right in the world in Benghazi:
It's conservatives' fault. We tricked them into being so gullible and so fact-deprived. By lodging criticism, we forced them to call all criticism beyond the pale and indeed signs of a worrisome psychological infirmity.
If the three new witnesses don’t get the attention they deserve, Fox News and its ilk deserves much of the blame.
So Fox was correct in pushing the story, but it's their fault that no other media outlet followed up (one major exception: A single reporter at CBS named Sharyl Atkisson),
3c)Pathetic
By William Kristol
The Obama administration’s Syria policy is bad enough, and this State Department press release from this morning is just pathetic:
Massacre in al-Bayda
Press Statement
Jen Psaki
Spokesperson, Office of the Spokesperson
Washington, DC
May 4, 2013
The United States is appalled by horrific reports that more than 100 people were killed May 2 in gruesome attacks on the coastal town of al-Bayda, Syria. Regime and Shabiha forces reportedly destroyed the area with mortar fire then stormed the town and executed entire families, including women and children. We extend our deepest condolences to the families of the victims of this tragedy.
We strongly condemn atrocities against the civilian population and reinforce our solidarity with the Syrian people. As the Assad regime’s violence against innocent civilians escalates, we will not lose sight of the men, women, and children whose lives are being so brutally cut short.
We call on all responsible actors in Syria to speak out against the perpetration of unlawful killings against any group, regardless of faith or ethnicity. Those responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law and serious violations and abuses of human rights law must be held accountable.
In sum: “The United States is appalled….We extend our deepest condolences….We strongly condemn….We will not lose sight….We call on all responsible actors….Those responsible…must be held accountable.”
If the government of the United States is unwilling to do anything but present to the world the sorry spectacle of justice without a sword or justice unwilling to use the sword, surely it would be better to say nothing. If the Obama administration is, as Churchill put it in November 1936, “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent,” then it should have the decency to keep silent rather than engage in such pitiable and contemptible posturing.
3d)DEMOCRATS' AGENDA FOR BENGHAZI HEARING: PROTECT HILLARY AT ALL COSTS
Ahead of Wednesday's long-awaited hearings at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the Benghazi terror attack of Sep. 11, 2012, Democrats have a clear agenda: protect Hillary Clinton at all costs.
Clinton, the former Secretary of State and likely frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, could be severely damaged by testimony about the attacks, which occurred in part because of security lapses for which the State Department is primarily responsible.
Past testimony about the attacks has also revealed that President Barack Obama
did nothing once informed the attacks were under way, and that there was no communication among key members of the administration and military who could have responded.
In her own testimony before Congress in January before leaving office, Clinton was evasive, famously
shouting at Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), "What difference does it make?" in reference to the question of who had edited the administration's talking points to remove references to Islamist terror and emphasize a protest that never happened.
The media applauded her performance, but her outburst left an impression of apathy about the four Americans who were killed that night in Benghazi, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.
Since the day after the attacks, Democrats and the media have treated Benghazi as an unfair political attack by Republicans, rather than a legitimate national security crisis in its own right.
Media coverage in the fall focused on Republican Mitt Romney's response to the attacks, rather than Obama's actions as commander-in-chief. When questions were raised about whether Obama had lied to the public about the attacks, the media covered Obama's tracks, with CNN's Candy Crowley intervening in the second presidential debate to defend the president, and CBS News suppressing damning footage of the president until shortly before the election.
With Obama safely re-elected, the goal is now to protect Hillary Clinton. Last week, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD)
called upon Speaker of the House John Boehner not only to retract, but to apologize publicly for, an inter-committee report that suggested Clinton had ignored requests for additional security in Libya.
On MSNBC, a channel that serves as the mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, Rev. Al Sharpton--who also serves as an informal White House adviser--
described the Benghazi investigation as the "new vast right-wing conspiracy," a reference to Clinton's claim, as First Lady, that Republicans were merely out to target her husband and that he had not committed any wrongdoing in the Monica Lewinsky affair that led to his impeachment.
Though there are undoubtedly some political motives present, Democrats' claims are largely a projection of their own political agenda in Benghazi, which has remained consistent from the start: to shield the party and its leaders from responsibility for a major terrorist attack on American sovereign territory.
That agenda far exceeds any pursued by Republicans, whose goals, however political, happen to include the national security interests at stake.
On this past weekend's Sunday shows, Democrats
showed unusual willingness to criticize the Obama administration over Benghazi, acknowledging that the Benghazi talking points had been false.
Yet that willingness to criticize may be a way of inoculating the party against further revelations to come; it may also be easier because new information about the Benghazi talking points has tended to implicate the White House rather than Clinton herself, even if State Department officials have also been listed among those involved.
Clinton's role in Benghazi is particularly damaging because it risks becoming the signature legacy of her tenure at the State Department. Despite racking up an exhaustive travel record, Clinton had few actual achievements to show for her four years as Secretary of State--a burden as she contemplates her 2016 ambitions.
At least one key witness in Wednesday's hearing, Mark. I. Thompson, is expected to offer testimony highly damaging to Clinton. He has alleged that Clinton sidelined the State Department's counter-terrorism operation during the Benghazie attacks: "You should have seen what (Clinton) tried to do to us that night," he has said,
according to Fox News.
Though Democrats seem to have shifted their focus to Clinton's prospects, Obama himself is not free of the troubles Benghazi presents. Evidence continues to emerge that senior White House officials were directly involved in the manipulation of the Benghazi talking points, suggesting that there had been a deliberate decision to mislead the public.
Obama has yet to explain his own actions--or inaction--during and after the attack. His activities throughout the evening of Sep. 11 are unknown; he flew to Las Vegas for a fundraiser the next day.
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4) Morici to Moneynews: Obama's Economic Strategy an 'Absolute Tragedy' for US
By Dan Weil and David Nels
President Barack Obama's economic policies are proving disastrous for the country, says Peter Morici, a professor of international business at the University of Maryland.
"The three horses in the apocalypse for the American economy are Obama's energy policies, . . . excessive business regulation . . . and Obamacare," he tells Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview.
The energy policy is "shutting down drilling in the eastern Gulf and off the coast of the Atlantic and Pacific," Morici says. The amount of regulation that affects the economy has tripled under Obama, raising the cost of capital and keeping people from creating jobs, he says.
As for the Affordable Care Act, it's "a definite negative drag on the economy," Morici states.
"Already, healthcare costs are 50 percent higher than Germany," he said. "They have a private healthcare system, so do we, and they have better outcomes than we do. Yet ours is more expensive. And Obamacare makes it even more expensive for employers to provide."
The overall impact of all this isn't pretty, Morici says.
"No president could have conceived a better program for shutting down jobs creation, collaring growth, and setting America on the path to decline than Mr. Obama's team," he states. "It's an absolute tragedy what's happening to the United States."
The playbook calls for increased spending on entitlements without regard for cost and increased regulations without regard for business, Morici says. That's similar to Italy, France and Spain in the 1960s through '80s, he says.
"I don’t care to have their new millennium, and I don’t think Americans should either," he said. "It's unfortunate, but we're saddled with this for four more years."
Discussing April jobs data, Morici said, "it was a pretty decent jobs report as these things go the last several months."
Unemployment fell to a four-year low of 7.5 percent last month, and non-farm payrolls rose a bigger-than-expected 165,000. March's payroll gain was revised up to 138,000 from 88,000.
"Not only was this number [April payrolls] up, but that terrible number from March was revised upward," Morici says.
"So we're about on the trend we have been, which means the economy is growing slowly," he said. "We're not creating enough jobs to really put everybody back to work."
Without the falling adult participation rate in the workforce, unemployment would be near 10 percent, Morici says. "But certainly we're not in the soup as we expected we might be."
Still, the economy's expansion is disappointing, Morici says. GDP growth has run at a 2.1 percent annual pace over the last 45 months, he states. The comparable figure during the Reagan administration was 5.3 percent.
"Both presidents had 10 percent-plus unemployment; Mr. Reagan accomplished a lot more," Morici says. "We simply could and should be doing better."
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