Algeria Attackers Also Took Part in 9-11 US Embassy Attack in Libya

Same attackers using the same weapons and all linked to al-Qaeda. So much for that “al-Qaeda is on its heels” comment by Obama.

ALGIERS — Several Egyptian members of the squad of militants that lay bloody siege to an Algerian gas complex last week also took part in the deadly attack on the United States Mission in Libya in September, a senior Algerian official said Tuesday.

The Egyptians involved in both attacks were killed by Algerian forces during the four-day ordeal that ended in the deaths of at least 38 hostages and 29 kidnappers, the official said. But three of the militants were captured alive, and one of them described the Egyptians’ role in both assaults under interrogation by the Algerian security services, the official said.

If confirmed, the link between two of the most brazen assaults in recent memory would reinforce the transborder character of the jihadist groups now striking across the Sahara. American officials have long warned that the region’s volatile mix of porous borders, turbulent states, weapons and ranks of fighters with similar ideologies creates a dangerous landscape in which extremists are trying to collaborate across vast distances.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is scheduled to testify before Congress on Wednesday about the Libyan attack that killed the American ambassador and three staff members, raised the specter of regional cooperation among extremists soon after the mission in Benghazi was overrun.

In particular, she said the Islamist militant takeover of northern Mali had created a “safe haven” for terrorists to “extend their reach” and work with other extremists in North Africa, “as we tragically saw in Benghazi,” though she offered no clear evidence of such ties.

Now the Algerians say the plot to seize the gas complex in the desert was hatched in northern Mali as well. Indeed, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the veteran militant who has claimed overall responsibility for the siege, is believed to be based there.

[...]“This is the result of the Arab Spring,” said the official said, who spoke on condition of anonymity because investigations into the hostage crisis were still under way. “I hope the Americans are conscious of this.”

American counterterrorism and intelligence officials have said that some members of Ansar al-Shariah, the group that carried out the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, had connections to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, one of the militant groups now holding northern Mali. But American officials have also said that the Qaeda affiliate played no role in directing or instigating that Benghazi attack.

Sure, you can totally trust the Obama regime on these al-Qaeda attacks. They wouldn’t lie to us about the surge of terrorist attacks before an election (wink).

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Why Won’t the White House or CIA Release CIA Director Petraeus’ Libya “Trip Report?”

So….now we learn that the recently resigned CIA Director made a personal trip to Libya days after the Sept. 11th attack in Benghazi to make his own “findings” about what happened. The White House isn’t turning over this information so Sen. Dianne Feinstein is threatening to subpoena this report or have Petraeus testify before the Senate Intelligence committee.

From Daily Caller:

In a Sunday interview with Fox News, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein dismissed the possibility that CIA director David Petraeus’ resignation is connected to the September attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. But she is not will to dismiss Petraeus’ involvement in the Libya incident.

On MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on Monday, Feinstein suggested that Petraeus made an unpublicized visit to Libya after the Sept. 11 attack. The California Democratic senator accused the Obama intelligence community of withholding a report about the trip and threatened a subpoena if the White House continued to resist her committee’s inquiries.

“The premise is not necessarily an investigation,” Feinstein said, speaking of an investigation into Petraeus. “The premise is to see exactly what happened. I believe that Director Petraeus made a trip to the region, shortly before this became public. I believe that there is a trip report. We have asked to see the trip report. One person tells me he has read it, and then we tried to get it and they tell me it hasn’t been done. That’s unacceptable. We are entitled to this trip report, and if we have to go to the floor of the Senate on a subpoena, we will do just that.”

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Benghazi Investigator Slams America and ‘Islamophobes’

Is it really shocking that Team Obama appointed a Muslim/Islam appeaser to head the “investigation” on what happened in Benghazi? Idiots on the left use the word “Islamophobia” and “Islamophobes” in the same way they use the race card to shut down debate. This administration has made apologizing for America their number one priority along with appeasing those who follow the radical religion of Islam.

From FrontPageMag:

America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities.

So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished, diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling the epithet “Islamophobe” the same way American leftists use the word “racist” to shut down debate.

Pickering’s pontifications came two and a half weeks after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named him to head a State Department “Accountability Review Board” tasked with examining the circumstances surrounding the deaths on Sept. 11, 2012, the 11^th anniversary of 9/11, of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, information management officer Sean Smith, and security personnel Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were not security personnel at the US consulate. They were there looking for weapons (MANPADs)  the Obama administration had given to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan rebels.

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White House: Those E-mails That Show We Knew the Benghazi Attack was a Terrorist Act Doesn’t Prove We Lied…Time and Time Again

The spinning continues.

The White House has flip-flopped so many time on the Benghazi attack. First they blamed a YouTube video. Then they claimed it was a spontaneous attack by a mob of angry Muslims who were upset about…..a YouTube video. Then we learn that the White House knew within a few hours that it was a terrorist attack on top of finding out a US Predator drone was dispatched to watch the attack unfold. The spin and cover-up continue.

The White House wants everyone to believe all these e-mails that contradict their story shouldn’t be believed.

From ABC News:

The White House this morning attempted to down-play the significance of emails sent to top national security officials during the attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, one of which suggested a known terrorist group claimed credit for the attack in its immediate aftermath.

As obtained by ABC News’ John Parkinson and posted last night, the emails seem to be ones sent by the State Department Operations Center to distribution lists and email accounts for the top national security officials at the State Department, Pentagon, the FBI, the White House Situation Room and the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

One of the emails reported that officials that Ansar al-Sharia claimed responsibility for the Benghazi attack on Facebook and Twitter, and had threatened to attack the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli.

In the first couple weeks after the attack, the White House and Obama administration generally blamed the attack on a demonstration an anti-Muslim video that got out of control. On September 14, White House press secretary Jay Carney asserted that “we have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack.” Only later would the Obama administration say the attack was planned.

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Reuters: State Department Never Responded to Two Request for More Security at US Embassy

As the cover-up unwinds, who will be thrown under the bus?

(Reuters) – A U.S. security officer twice asked his State Department superiors for more security agents for the American mission in Benghazi months before an attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, but he got no response.

The officer, Eric Nordstrom, who was based in Tripoli until about two months before the September attack, said a State Department official, Charlene Lamb, wanted to keep the number of U.S. security personnel in Benghazi “artificially low,” according to a memo summarizing his comments to a congressional committee that was obtained by Reuters.

Nordstrom also argued for more U.S. security in Libya by citing a chronology of over 200 security incidents there from militia gunfights to bomb attacks between June 2011 and July 2012. Forty-eight of the incidents were in Benghazi.

A brief summary of Nordstrom’s October 1 interview with the Republican-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was contained in a memo prepared by the committee’s minority Democratic staff.

Nordstrom’s actions and those of his superiors are likely to figure prominently in a House committee hearing on Wednesday that will be Congress’ first public examination of what went wrong at the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi.

The State Department has defended security procedures in Libya and convened its own independent review board. A State Department official declined to comment on what Nordstrom told lawmakers in private, noting that Nordstrom would testify at the public hearing on Wednesday and “that’s something that will come out in the hearing.”

The State Department ignored the request for extra security in a volatile country full of Islamic terrorist. Why would the State Department want to keep security at a lower level? Guess Hillary and Obama will have to get their stories straight during their meeting today.

President Obama is scheduled to meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this afternoon in the Oval Office, as more damaging details about the terrorist attack against a United States consulate in Libya emerge.

Yesterday, the State Department revealed  that the attack was “unprecedented” and wasn’t preceded by a protest over the controversial YouTube video, directly contradicting explanation of the attack by the Obama administration.

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What Did Obama Know About Benghazi Attack and When Did He Know It? (Video)

 

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Ex-U.S. Security Team Leader in Libya: “We Needed More, Not Less” Security Staff

The cover-up continues to be exposed.

Team Obama lied to cover up the fact that they had warning about the attacks, knew who conducted the attacks and tried to blame everything, including an anti-Muhammad YouTube video, for the attack. The Obama administration knowingly lied to the American public in order to hide their failures.

(CBS News) The former head of a Special Forces “Site Security Team” in Libya tells CBS News that in spite of multiple pleas from himself and other U.S. security officials on the ground for “more, not less” security personnel, the State Department removed as many as 34 people from the country in the six months before the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others.

Lt. Col. Andy Wood will appear this week at a House Oversight Committee hearing that will examine security decisions leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi.

Speaking to CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Wood said when he found out that his own 16-member team and a six-member State Department elite force were being pulled from Tripoli in August – about a month before the assault in Benghazi – he felt, “like we were being asked to play the piano with two fingers. There was concern amongst the entire embassy staff.”

He said other staffers approached him with their concerns when the reduction in security personnel was announced.

“They asked if we were safe,” he told Attkisson. “They asked… what was going to happen, and I could only answer that what we were being told is that they’re working on it – they’ll get us more (security personnel), but I never saw that.”

Wood insists that senior staff in Libya, including Ambassador Stevens, State Department Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom, and himself, all wanted and had requested enhanced security.

“We felt we needed more, not less,” he tells Attkisson.

Asked what response their repeated pleas got from the State Department in Washington, Wood says they were simply told “to do with less. For what reasons, I don’t know.”

“We tried to illustrate… to show them how dangerous and how volatile and just unpredictable that whole environment was over there. So to decrease security in the face of that really is… it’s just unbelievable,” Wood tells CBS News.

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Romney: No Transparency from Obama on Benghazi attack (Video)

Wonder if this will come up during the next debate. Obama and his liberal media minions better hope foreign policy isn’t a subject. We already seen Obama flop on his economic record.

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State Department Confirms: 13 Threats Against US Embassy Before 9/11 Attack & US Embassy Requested Increased Security

The Obama administration has blood on their hands and the cover-up continues to be exposed.

From CBS:

A House committee says a State Department officer told panel members there were 13 threats made against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya during the six months before the Sept. 11 attack on the facility.

The assault left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The panel adds that the officer told it the U.S. mission had made repeated requests for increased security.

A spokesman for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is holding a hearing on the controversy next week, says its source is Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom, who was stationed in Libya from September 2011 to June 2012.

According to the panel, Nordstrom has already given a private briefing to members and will be called to testify at the session next Wednesday.

Separately, The Washington Post says one of its reporters found “sensitive documents” that were “only loosely secured” in the burned-out remains of the consulate Wednesday. The newspaper says the discovery “further complicates efforts by the Obama administration to respond to what has rapidly become a major foreign-policy issue just weeks before the election.“

The oversight committee has also requested testimony from a second State Department official, Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Programs Charlene Lamb, who is involved in reviewing security requests.

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White House: “No Comment” on White House Denied Security Requests for US Embassy in Libya

Something else to hide?

From ABCNews:

White House press secretary Jay Carney declined to comment on an assertion by the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that requests from diplomats in Libya for added security prior to the September 11, 2012 attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, were denied.

“I’m not going to get into a situation under review by the State Department and the FBI,” Carney said.

Earlier today, chairman of the committee Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, the chair of the subcommittee on national security, homeland defense, and foreign operations, wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asserting that “multiple U.S. federal government officials have confirmed to the Committee that, prior to the September 11 (2012) attack, the U.S. mission in Libya made repeated requests for increased security in Benghazi. The mission in Libya, however, was denied these requests by officials in Washington.”

The two congressmen also listed thirteen incidents leading up to the attack – ranging from I.E.D. and RPG attacks to a “posting on a pro-Gaddafi Facebook page” publicizing early morning runs taken by the late Ambassador Chris Stevens and his security detail around Tripoli.

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