Saturday, May 23, 2015

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Internal emails show Clinton got detailed intel on 'planned' Benghazi hit


Internal State Department emails in the aftermath of the Benghazi terror attack show then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received detailed information indicating the strike was planned by well-trained fighters, yet her office continued to push the narrative days later that it began "spontaneously."
The messages were among 296 emails released Friday by the State Department, in the first batch of emails to be made public from Clinton's tenure as secretary of state. Totaling 896 pages, the emails show a series of Libya dispatches Clinton received from a confidant, as well as the barrage of messages among her and her aides after Sept. 11, 2012.
Those messages depict the rapidly changing understanding of what happened at the U.S. compound that night, and the administration's internal struggle to settle on a public narrative.
As previously reported, confidant Sidney Blumenthal fired off two memos in the two days after the attack. But the full email release shows he gave a highly detailed picture of what "sources" said had happened that night. Initially, on Sept. 12, he sent Clinton an email linking the attacks to anger over an anti-Islam Internet video which had triggered protests across the region.
CLICK TO READ THE EMAILS
But the next day, he sent Clinton an email with very different information, saying officials believed the attackers were with the Islamist militia Ansar al-Sharia. He wrote that officials thought the attackers "prepared" for the strike and "took advantage of the cover" from demonstrations over the video. Further, he cited sources saying roughly 21 fighters left from a base in East Benghazi and "infiltrated the crowd" and began opening fire on the U.S. consulate. Libyan officers, he wrote, said the attacks were "planned" for roughly one month.
Fighters with the brigade were described as "well-trained, hardened killers, many of whom have spent time in Afghanistan and Yemen."
Despite the guidance, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice went on several television programs Sept. 16 to claim the attacks were "spontaneous," and not premeditated, and link them to protests over the anti-Islam video.
The department appeared to back her. In an email sent that day from top department official Jake Sullivan to Clinton, he said Rice had made clear "our view" that "this started spontaneously and then evolved."
Yet on Sept. 24, after a fierce political debate had broken out over the nature of the attacks, the same official sent Clinton a compilation of her own statements on Benghazi, assuring her "you never said spontaneous or characterized the motives" and only said "some sought to justify" the attack by citing the video.
The exchanges are sure to fuel the long-running debate over why some in the administration initially pushed the video explanation and played down the idea that the attack was planned. Fox News reported earlier this week that a Defense Intelligence Agency report from Sept. 12 also said there were indicators the attack was planned and meant as retaliation for a drone strike that killed an Al Qaeda strategist.
Fox News also reported in October 2012 that a set of internal emails declared Ansar al-Sharia claimed responsibility for the attack in Benghazi virtually as the raid played out. The emails were sent by the State Department to a variety of sources.
The emails released Friday are just a fraction of what the department has in its custody -- after it was revealed that Clinton used a private email address and server, and turned over her files to the department.
Spokeswoman Marie Harf said the emails were given to a House committee investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.
She said redactions were made according to Freedom of Information Act standards. The documents cover emails between 2011 and 2012 related to the Benghazi facility and its security, and to the broader issue of a U.S. diplomatic presence in Libya.
Harf said the emails "do not change the essential facts or our understanding " about the attacks that killed four Americans on Sept. 11, 2012. The State Department is still reviewing 55,000 further pages of emails from Clinton's private email account. They'll be published on a rolling basis.
Another email in the batch showed Clinton received information on her private email server that has now been classified about the deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi. The email in question, forwarded to Clinton by Sullivan, her deputy chief of chief, relates to reports of arrests in Libya of possible suspects in the attack.
The information was not classified at the time the email was sent but was upgraded from "unclassified" to "secret" on Friday at the request of the FBI, according to State Department officials. Because the information was not classified at the time the email was sent, no laws were violated, but Friday's redaction shows that Clinton received sensitive information on her unsecured personal server.
No other redactions were made to the collection of Benghazi-related emails for classification reasons, the officials said.
It is at the end of a chain of communication that originated with Bill Roebuck, the then-director of the Office of Maghreb Affairs, that pointed out that Libyan police had arrested several people who might have connections to the attack. The redacted portion appears to relate to who provided the information about the alleged suspects to the Libyans. A total of five lines related to the source of the information were affected, but only the 23 words were deleted because the FBI deemed them to be classified.
Benghazi committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., questioned the email release in a written statement on Friday, calling it part of a "self-selected public record."  
"It is also important to remember these email messages are just one piece of information that cannot be completely evaluated or fully understood without the total record. The Committee is working to collect and evaluate all of the relevant and material information necessary to evaluate the full range of issues in context," he said. "We will not reach any investigative conclusions until our work is complete, but these emails continue to reinforce the fact that unresolved questions and issues remain as it relates to Benghazi."
He reiterated that the committee wants Clinton to turn over her personal server and "the full body of emails over to a neutral, detached, independent third party for review."

Foundations plan to pay news media to cover radical UN agenda


EXCLUSIVE: The United Nations Foundation created by billionaire Ted Turner, along with a branch of media giant Thompson Reuters, is starting to train a squadron of journalists and subsidize media content in 33 countries—including the U.S. and Britain--in a planned $6 million effort to popularize the bulky and sweeping U.N.-sponsored Sustainable Development Goals, prior to a global U.N. summit this September. where U.N. organizers hope they will be endorsed by world leaders.
The unprecedented media push is formally intended to start on May 25 but is already underway. It is intended to help breathe some new life into a sprawling U.N. effort--supported by, among others, the Obama administration--to create a global social and environmental agenda for the next 15 years.
It is taking place in parallel with an equally strong but unrelated media cheerleading push by supporters of strong climate change action to help set in stone a new global greenhouse gas emissions treaty at a Paris summit in December.
A junior partner in the U.N. Foundation media training and subsidy effort is a not-for-profit organization known as the Jynwel Charitable Foundation Limited, whose co-director is a flamboyant Malaysian financial named Jho Low. Jynwel, a Low family creation, also recently plunked down $25 million to take over a sputtering U.N. humanitarian news agency known as IRIN and sharpen its message.
The training and subsidy effort “comes at a time when people want to know what it will take to eradicate extreme poverty and tackle the big questions related to sustainability,” Kathy Calvert, CEO of the U.N. Foundation, told Fox News. “If our work helps encourage the media to dive deeper into these issues, we are achieving something that is core to our mission but also a public good worthy of 2015's moment in history.”
“This is an important year or a robust decision on what the world and the U.N. will do in the next 15 years,” added Arron Sherinian, the Foundation's chief communications and marketing officer. “We thought we would do well to connect as many people to the conversation as possible.”
In fact, the media-training-and-subsidy blitz could also be described as extraordinary bid to pump up public interest and editorial support for a vast and wobbly U.N. campaign to create a new social and environmental agenda that is too nebulous to criticize and too ponderous to implement with any coherent effect. Nonetheless, that agenda is intended to drive national social, economic and environmental agendas for the next 15 years.
The new goals, known as the SDGs, have been under formal discussion in various U.N. fora for the past year. They consist of 17 major goals and 169 related targets and amount to a broad-based socialist and/or progressive agenda that by 2030 promises to end poverty and all forms of malnutrition everywhere, “attain healthy lives for all,” “reduce income equality within and between countries,” and “promote sustainable production and consumption,” among many other things.
The subtargets cover everything from “create and diversify seed and plant banks,” to “end preventable newborn, infant and under-five deaths,” to “achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including young people and persons with disabilities,” along with much, much more.
The goals are. the centerpiece of what the U.N. calls the “post-2015 development process” They are a grab-bag of environmental and social development measures that are too sprawling in scope and too open-ended to be effective, or apparently even to be widely understood.
So far as the new training and subsidy initiative is concerned, however, the problem is seen less in terms of problematic content and more in terms of popularizing the message by refocusing and re-educating the media—as well as helping to pay some of them for delivering the new intellectual freight.
“Very often the problem of the UN is that the speeches long, full of acronyms, and the jargon is difficult to understand,” Dominique Villa, head of the Thompson Reuters Foundation, told Fox News. “Making the jargon of the U.N. understandable is quite important.”
Under the plan, Villa's foundation, Thompson Reuters' non-profit arm, will carry out the training under contract from U.N. Foundation. (The Thompson Reuters Foundation, according to its website, also carries on for-profit training sessions.)
Journalists from Australia to Peru, and from Britain to Zimbabwe will be given five-day training programs by instructors drawn largely from the ranks of former Reuters journalists. The material will include encompass among other things how to better understand and explain U.N. opaque concepts of sustainability, with at least one section devoted to “financial and economic concepts,” Villa said.
Training sessions for the journalists—whose parent organizations are as yet unnamed—are slated to run through August.
U.S. training sessions will take place in New York and Los Angeles, although who will be given instruction—and whose editorial platforms will be subsidized—has not yet announced. Overall subsidies are expected to range between $25,000 and $100,000, with 15 recipients named by the end of May and another 15 by the end of June.
“Depending on financing we might be able to add a few more outlets to the list” a U.N. Foundation spokesperson told Fox News.” She emphasized that the subsidies are “grants designed to enhance the capacity of media organizations to partner on these issues. Full editorial control of content remains with the media outlet.”
Individual media outlets would announce their participation “once partnership details are finalized,” she said.
The subsidy approach, U.N. Foundation's Sherinian said, was “not dissimilar” to the funding that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has provided for sveral years to the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian, to publish what amounts to sponsored news about economic development issues, including the Foundation's campaign to extirpate AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
“We are asking the media to do what they do well,” Sherinian added. “If a media organization has the ability to do what it has done well, and if it could do more innovative work,” then “we are asking them to engage on the issue.”
The effort would also include “putting them in touch with people on the ground doing implementation work”--in other words, those who are actually going to put the goals into practice.
Not all of the funding for the effort has yet been raised, he added. “We are in both implementing and fundraising mode.”
At the same time as the U.N.-supporting foundations are boosting coverage of the “post-2015 development agenda,” an even bigger media coalition has just announced it will start lumping content for collective use in support of a new U.N.-sponsored treaty on greenhouse gases, which is supposed to be agreed upon at a summit meeting in December in Paris.
The so-called Climate Publishers Network, a 25-member group that includes The Guardian as well as such high-profile newspaper as Le Monde in France and El Pais in Spain, as well as the China Daily, have agreed to drop their mutual licensing fees to allow all network members to share their coverage on the climate change issue prior to the December 11 summit.
The network arrangement is slated to disband immediately afterward.
The U.N. Foundation's Sherinian said that the two programs “were not formally affiliated in a specific way,” and said he could not confirm “if or how the outlets involved in the Climate Publishers Network coincide with those involved in our program to date.”
But like the Climate Publishers with their self-imposed shut-off date, he said the U.N. Foundation would not commit to maintaining the SDG subsidy effort beyond this year—it was, he said, “too early to say.”
The same could be said of the success of either full-court effort to help build a media groundswell for the expansive and expensive U.N.-supported objectives.

Senate approves 'fast track' trade bill, measure goes to House


In a victory for President Barack Obama, the Senate passed bipartisan legislation Friday night to strengthen the administration's hand in global trade talks, clearing the way for a highly unpredictable summer showdown in the House.
The vote was 62-37 on the bill, which would let Obama complete trade deals that Congress could approve or reject, but not change. A total of 48 Republicans supported the bill, but only 14 the Senate's 44 Democrats backed a president of their own party on legislation near the top of his second-term agenda.
A separate measure to prevent parts of the anti-terror Patriot Act from lapsing, and a bill to prevent a cutoff in federal highway funding also awaited action by lawmakers who covetously eyed a weeklong vacation — set to begin whenever the work was done.
Senate passage of the trade bill capped two weeks of tense votes and near-death experiences for legislation the administration hopes will help complete an agreement with Japan and 10 other countries in the Pacific region.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Obama's indispensable ally in passing the bill, said it would create "new opportunities for bigger paychecks, better jobs, and a stronger economy.
"The tools it contains will allow us to knock down unfair foreign trade barriers that discriminate against American workers and products stamped "Made in the USA," he said.
The House is expected to debate the issue as early as next month.
There, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, supports the bill. But dozens of majority Republicans currently oppose it, either out of ideological reasons or because they are loath to enhance Obama's authority, especially at their own expense.
And Obama's fellow Democrats show little inclination to support legislation that much of organized labor opposes.
In the run-up to a final Senate vote, Democratic supporters of the legislation were at pains to lay to rest concerns that the legislation, like previous trade bills, could be blamed for a steady loss of jobs.
"The Senate now has the opportunity to throw the 1990s NAFTA playbook into the dust bin of history," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. He referred to the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed two decades ago, and a symbol to this day, fairly or not, of the loss of unemployment to a country with lax worker safety laws and low wages.
Wyden and others said this law had far stronger protections built into it.
One final attempt to add another one failed narrowly, 51-48 a few hours before the bill cleared.
It came on a proposal, by Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who supported the trade bill, and Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., who opposed it. They sought to made allegations of currency manipulation subject to the same "dispute settlement procedures" as other obligations under any trade deal.
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew warned earlier that its approval could cause Obama to veto the legislation. The president has said it could cause the demise of the current round of talks with 11 other Pacific-area nations, and also could pose a threat to the monetary policy that is designed to help the U.S. economy run better.
Portman, who was U.S. trade representative under former President George W. Bush, scoffed at threats of a veto. "I don't think so," he said in remarks on the Senate floor. "I think he (Obama) understands the importance" of his ability to conclude trade deals without congressional changes.
An alternative proposal backed by the White House merely stressed the importance of U.S. negotiators seeking ways to end the practice of currency manipulation, which can lower the price of foreign-made goods and place American-made products at a competitive disadvantage. It cleared on a vote of 70-29.
To mollify Democrats, the bill also included $1.8 billion in retraining funds for American workers who lose their jobs as a result of exports. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said the program duplicated other federal efforts, but his attempt to strip out the funds was defeated, 53-35.
The political alignment on the Patriot Act legislation was different, with the administration and McConnell on different sides.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest prodded the Senate to accept a House-passed bill renewing anti-terrorism programs due to expire June 1. He said that to do otherwise would put at risk "the ability of our national security professionals to keep us safe."
But the House bill included a provision to eliminate the National Security Agency's ability to collect mass telephone records of Americans. Instead, the material would remain with phone companies, with government searches of the information allowed by court order on a case-by-case basis.
"The untried — and as of yet, nonexistent — bulk-collection system envisioned under that bill would be slower and more cumbersome than the one that currently helps keep us safe," McConnell said in remarks on the Senate floor. At worst, he added, "it might not work at all."
The highway bill was the least controversial of the three on the Senate's pre-vacation agenda, but only because lawmakers agreed in advance on a two-month extension of the current law. The House and Senate will need to return to the issue this summer.
Lawmakers whose time generally is scheduled far in advance adjusted as best they could as the Senate struggled with work put off until the last minute.
"It's not the weather, it's the Senate that's the problem," said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., hoping to make it home by Saturday night for a turn as pianist with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra.

Senate blocks House bill on NSA surveillance, 2-month extension


The Republican-led Senate blocked a House-passed bill and several short-term extensions of the USA Patriot Act early Saturday.
The big stumbling block was a House-passed measure to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic phone records. Instead, the records would remain with telephone companies subject to a case-by-case review.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell favored retaining the program, but fellow Kentuckian and Republican presidential contender Rand Paul blocked any extension no matter how brief past the midnight May 31 expiration.
"This week, I stood on the floor for roughly 11 hours in defense of the Fourth Amendment and successfully blocked the renewal of the Patriot Act,” Paul said in a statement.
“We should never give up our rights for a false sense of security. This is only the beginning-- the first step of many.  I will continue to do all I can until this illegal government spying program is put to an end, once and for all."
McConnell announced early Saturday that the Senate would begin a week-long Memorial Day break and return Sunday, May 31, just hours before the programs lapse.
The Senate had been pressured by the White House to pass the House bill, which drew a large bipartisan vote last week and had the backing of GOP leaders, Democrats and the libertarian-leaning members.
However, the Senate blocked the bill by a vote of 57-42, just shy of the 60-vote threshold to move ahead.
The vote was followed by the rejected of a two-month extension to the existing programs. The vote went 54-45, short of the 60-vote threshold once again.
After the two votes, McConnell repeatedly asked for an even shorter renewal of current law ticking down days from June 8 to June 2. However, opponents of the post-Sept. 11 law objected every time.
Whatever the Senate approves, must be passed by the House, which had already left for Washington for the Memorial Day recess.
Officials say they will lose valuable surveillance tools if the Senate fails to go along with the house. But key GOP senators, including McConnell, disapprove of the House’s approach.
In the near term, the Justice Department has said the NSA would begin winding down its collection of domestic calling records this week if the Senate fails to act because the collection takes some time to halt.
At issue is a section of the Patriot Act, Section 215, used by the government to justify secretly collecting the "to and from" information about nearly every American landline telephone call. For technical and bureaucratic reasons, the program was not collecting a large chunk of mobile phone records, which made it less effective as few people continued to use landlines.
When former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the program in 2013, many Americans were outraged that the agency had their calling records. President Obama ultimately announced a plan similar to the USA Freedom Act and asked Congress to pass it. He said the plan would preserve the NSA's ability to hunt for domestic connections to international plots without having an intelligence agency holding millions of Americans' private data.
Because the government had the extraordinary powers, Section 215 of the Patriot Act was designed to expire at midnight May 31, unless Congress renews it.
Under the USA Freedom Act, the government would transition over six months to a system under which it queries the phone companies with known terrorists' numbers to get back a list of numbers that had been in touch with a terrorist number.
But if Section 215 expires without replacement, the government would lack the blanket authority to conduct those searches. There would be legal methods to hunt for connections in U.S. phone records to terrorists, said current and former U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. But those methods would not be applicable in every case.
Far less attention has been paid to two other surveillance authorities that expire as well. One makes it easier for the FBI to track "lone wolf" terrorism suspects who have no connection to a foreign power, and another allows the government to eavesdrop on suspects who continuously discard their cellphones in an effort to avoid surveillance.

Islamic State group radio claims Saudi mosque suicide attack; promise more 'black days' for Shiites


The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in Saudi Arabia, warning that more "black days" loom ahead in a direct challenge to the rulers of the Sunni kingdom.
Friday's attack was the kingdom's deadliest militant assault since a 2004 Al Qaeda attack on foreign worker compounds, which sparked a massive Saudi security force crackdown.
However, this Islamic State attack in the village of al-Qudeeh in the eastern Qatif region targeted Shiites, whom ultraconservatives in Saudi Arabia regularly denounce as heretics.
The statement on the Islamic State group's al-Bayan radio station, read aloud Friday night and posted Saturday morning to militant websites associated with the extremists, identified the suicide bomber as a Saudi citizen with the nom de guerre Abu Amer al-Najdi. The station also identified the attack as being carried out by a new Islamic State branch in "Najd Province," referring to the historic region of the central Arabian Peninsula home to the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
The mosque attack killed at least 21 people and wounded 81, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.
The Islamic State group -- formerly Al Qaeda's branch in Iraq which broke away and overran much of that country and neighboring Syria -- has become notorious for its attacks on Shiites, including a deadly Shiite mosque bombing in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, that killed more than 130 people. It was blamed for the killing of eight Shiites in a mosque shooting in eastern Saudi Arabia in November.
The al-Bayan message warned Shiites of coming "black days that will hurt you," pledging to expel all Shiites from the Arabian Peninsula.
The attack comes as Saudi Arabia is part of a U.S.-led coalition targeting the Islamic State group. In late April, Saudi officials arrested 93 people they said were involved in an Islamic State plot to attack the U.S. Embassy and other targets.
There already are heightened Sunni-Shiite tensions in the region as Saudi Arabia and Shiite power Iran back opposite sides in conflicts in Syria and Yemen.

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