As the Benghazi Plot Thickens, Congress Must Not Get Sidetracked

By Andrew C. McCarthy
PJ Media
November 20, 2012

CBS News is reporting that it was the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that purged references to “al Qaeda” and “terrorism” from talking points given to Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Rice used those talking points to promote the lie that the Benghazi massacre resulted from a spontaneous mob protest rather than a planned terrorist attack. CBS adds that the CIA and FBI signed off on this false version of events.

This is all farce, of course. There being no more honor among con-men than among thieves, there comes a time in all busted conspiracies when the conspirators start pointing fingers at each other. With their guy safely reelected, this spectacle has finally drawn the Obamedia’s attention to the president’s Benghazi travesty. Let’s not get lost here. It is critical to step back and bear two things in mind:

(a) All of the players here, including Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (both of whom the CBS report purports to absolve), are guilty of conspiracy — in this case, to mislead Americans about the cause of the attack and to aid the administration’s Islamist allies, whose objective is to impose sharia blasphemy standards on our country (a project on which the Obama administration has been colluding with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation since 2009). It was not for their own benefit that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Rice were, respectively, doctoring talking points and using them to create a false impression. Obama was the intended beneficiary. Patently the White House — which pitched Rice to the Sunday shows because Obama wanted to get the Mohammed-movie talking points publicly aired — was in the loop.

(b) Given that the conspiracy is a cover-up, there is the more salient matter of what is being covered up? The brain-dead mantra in Washington is always — all together now — “The cover-up is worse than the crime.” That is not true here. To be  sure, it is very serious that Rice was sent out to trumpet the false narrative; that Clapper apparently orchestrated the purge of information about al-Qaeda’s complicity; and that a compromised General David Petraeus appears to have knowingly misled Congress (that’s a felony) in his initial briefing about Benghazi on September 14. They and others involved in the cover-up should have a day of reckoning. But vastly more significant is what the administration was and is so desperate to obscure by the cover-up.

There are three areas matters of great concern:

1. The Benghazi attack was the natural result of Obama’s Libya policy.

Four Americans were killed in Benghazi as a direct result of President Obama’s unprovoked and, I believe,unconstitutional war in Libya. This foolish gambit had the easily foreseeable result of empowering Islamists, very much including violent jihadists who now have access to much of the Qaddafi arsenal, in addition to other arms and training they received from the U.S. and NATO in the mission to overthrow Qaddafi (then, an American ally).

When the subject of Ms. Rice’s fitness to be secretary of state arose during last week’s press conference, the presidentsummoned up some faux bravado, daring two Rice critics, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to “go after me,” not the gracious Madame Ambassador, if they wanted a fight. (Obama’s indignant performance was a cheap knock-off of the key scene in one of the Left’s favorite movies, The American President. There, the suave progressive president (Michael Douglas) defends the honor of his green-lobbyist paramour (Annette Bening) against offensive insinuations by The Evil Republican (Richard Dreyfuss). It’s not the first time Obama has gone Hollywood in this fashion.)

It is no surprise that Obama is feeling his oats at the prospect of a show-down with McCain and Graham — the senators were even hotter for Obama’s Libya war than Obama was. But most conservatives were not. Congressional Republicans shrank from taking on McCain and mounting a meaningful opposition to Obama’s Libya war, but many of them rightly believed the policy was disastrous. The Mohammed-movie cover-up is a blatant attempt to avoid much-needed scrutiny of that policy.

Senators McCain and Graham are to be applauded for what they’ve done over the last two months. Maddeningly, the Republican Party’s most visible figure, its presidential nominee Mitt Romney, went silent on the Benghazi massacre in the campaign stretch-run despite the commander-in-chief’s shocking failure to defend Americans under attack (more on that in a moment). In my humble opinion, it cost him the election. Unlike Romney, the senators have demanded accountability for what happened on September 11, 2012. They’ve also been admirably strong in raising the issue of Ms. Rice’s lack of qualifications, and in not backing down when the president did his impassioned-defense-of-the-woman-scorned routine.

Nevertheless, the conditions that catalyzed the Benghazi massacre arose out of what my recent book calls “Spring Fever”: longstanding administration policies regarding the “Arab Spring” generally, and Libya in particular. The senators were and apparently remain ardent supporters of those policies. Conservatives and others opposed to the government’s “Islamic democracy” project — its knowing empowerment of Islamists hostile to the West — should not cede leadership on Benghazi to that project’s proponents. If you want to get to the bottom of why the massacre happened, you cannot rely on the people who supported the strategy of which the  massacre is a foreseeable result.

2. The commander-in-chief’s dereliction of duty during a 7-hour siege. 

The jihadist siege against the American installation in Benghazi lasted for over seven hours. The commander-in-chief knew the attack was underway while it was happening — which is obviously why he won’t answer questions about when and how he learned of it. He had military assets in proximity to Benghazi that could have come to the aid of the besieged Americans. Yet, Obama failed to take meaningful military action, an inexcusable dereliction of duty. Then, he told the American people he had done all he could do to protect those who were killed and wounded, an inexcusable betrayal of trust. Both counts of malfeasance are impeachable offenses. Rice’s false statements, Clapper’s purge, and Petraeus’s contradictory statements to Congress do not erase any of that. Obama has far more to answer for than anyone else in this debacle, and it is imperative that he be held accountable.

3. What on earth was the administration up to in Benghazi?

The U.S. installations in Benghazi were not a consulate. Consular functions in Libya are carried out in Tripoli. Petraeus described Benghazi’s ostensible State Department compound in Benghazi as a “consulate,” but that description has been retracted: the administration now calls it a “diplomatic facility.” There doesn’t appear to have been much diplomatic action there, though. The other relevant compound was a CIA facility for … well, we don’t know. No explanation has been forthcoming from the administration, and notwithstanding the media’s preternatural interest in CIA facilities during the Bush years, the American press (Fox News honorably excepted) does not seem especially curious this time around.

Both Fox News and Paula Broadwell (Petraeus’s mistress) have claimed that the CIA was detaining Libyan jihadists in Benghazi. The CIA appears to deny that allegation, but the denial seems awfully lawyerly.

As Fox reports, the agency says, “The CIA has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 1349 was issued [by Obama]. Any suggestion that the agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless.” (Emphasis added.) The assertion that intelligence agents did not have authority is not a denial that they detained prisoners without authority. We already know they lacked authority — that’s why the allegation that they detained prisoners is controversial in the first place. And the reference to “the detention business” obviously relates to post 9/11 CIA practice, under which the agency was systematically detaining terrorists. It is not necessarily a denial that they ever detain anyone under any circumstances. You could easily imagine a slippery government spokesman rationalizing that  the systematic “detention business” would not apply to a one-off detention episode in Libya; therefore, saying you’re out of the former does not necessarily mean you refrained from the latter. Besides, the Rice fiasco reminds us of the Obama administration penchant for having forceful statements issued by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. So until someone with competent knowledge specifically and convincingly denies that the Benghazi facility was used for detention, this is an open question.

It has also been suggested that the U.S. facilities in Benghazi were the hub for an Iran-Contra-style program to gather weapons from Libyan jihadists for shipment to Syrian jihadists trying to overthrow the Assad regime. The latter arebeing given safe haven by the Islamist government of Turkey, where the CIA covertly steers arms to them,according to the New York Times. Lo and behold, Turkey’s consul general was — for some reason — meeting with U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens shortly before the September 11 siege began and Stevens was murdered. What on earth was going on here? The State Department’s explanation that Stevens convened a night meeting with a Turkish official in an enormously dangerous place (which had previously been attacked) on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities in order to have a “diplomatic meeting” he could easily have held in Tripoli is, to be generous, dubious.

Conclusion: The false Mohammed-movie narrative: discredited yet still working.

The false Mohammed-movie narrative is working. No, nobody any longer maintains or believes that the obscure movie caused the Benghazi massacre — that misdirection effort has been blown out of the water. But a three-ring circus has been erected around the false video narrative, with the Petraeus/Rice/Clapper follies detracting attention from the three essential issues: the Obama administration’s disastrous Libya policy, the president’s dereliction of duty on September 11, 2012, and the troubling goings-on at the Benghazi consulate that wasn’t a consulate.

The cover-up here is not worse than the crime. Congress must not allow itself to get sidetracked. What matters most is what the administration is hiding — not the fact that the administration is hiding it.

Twinkicide: Death by Liberalism

Hostess Bakers union, Newsweek editors and the liberal lemming phenomenon.

By Jeffrey Lord

The American Spectator

November 20, 2012

Twinkicide.

Death by Liberalism.

This time it's Twinkies.

In October it was Newsweek.

Who's next? What does this lemming-like liberal instinct mean for America?

What is it that bakers and editors had in common as they looked into the abyss that would spell their own professional death? And then jumped?

Answer: They'd rather be dead than Not Liberal. Unfortunately for the rest of us -- they are not alone. Worse, they are in charge.

Presented with multiple opportunities to survive in a jobless economy -- the bakers and editors willingly jumped into the abyss that would kill their own professional way of life. Forever. 

With all the brio of Paul Newman and Robert Redford as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid cornered by the law and yelling "Ohhhhhhhhhh Sh……………t" as they presumably jumped to their deaths, both the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union -- a.k.a. the 18,500 Americans who make Twinkies and other Hostess company products -- and the editors who produced the once economically viable newsmagazine Newsweek faced a stark choice. Adapt to survive and prosper -- or kill businesses that are respectively 85 years old and 80 years old. Thus killing their own jobs.

Either be fair and balanced in their union demands for baking and delivering Twinkies. And fair and balanced for their editorial product in producing a Newsweek magazine that once presented itself as just the news of the week.

Or die.

The bakers union and the magazine editors chose death.

Bye bye! 

The bakers union chose to professionally execute their own members -- not to mention James Hoffa's Teamsters -- taking with them a legendary baking company's 18,500 jobs. The editors of a legendary magazine's still unannounced "staff cuts" -- as the magazine does a physical vanishing act, departing from newsstands never to be seen again -- chose non-physical publication over editorial fairness.

Fittingly, one of Newsweek's last covers is a depiction of Barack Obama as a post-election Emperor Napoleon. There not being a trace of irony about a soon-to-be defunct magazine last owned by a 90-something year old rich liberal white guy headlining the GOP as, no kidding : "You're Old, You're White, You're History!" Nor is there a glimmer of irony about how exactly the real Napoleon ended his career.

Do the names "Waterloo" and "St. Helena" ring a bell?

What to make of this lemming-like phenomenon?

Let's start with the bakers.

Our friends at the Wall Street Journal have laid out the basics.

• A strike by one of a dozen Hostess unions, the Bakers, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union.
• Hostess had "sales of $2.5 billion in 2011 but lost $341 million and lacked the cash flow" to survive a strike.
• One of the reasons for this was "a labor-rule burden that by comparison makes Detroit look like Hong Kong."
• ·Hostess had $52 million in workers' comp claims in 2011, per an earlier bankruptcy filing.
• ·Hostess had 372 collective bargaining agreements "to maintain 80 different health and benefit plans, 40 pension plans and mandated a $31 million increase in wages and other benefits from backrooms to shelves."
• Union rules forbade cake and bread products from being delivered to a store in one truck. There had to be two -- one for cake, one for bread. "Drivers weren't allowed to load their own vehicles, and the workers who loaded bread weren't allowed to load cake."

There's more but you get the picture.

When the company said they could do no more, especially after two bankruptcies induced by all of this, the union refused to accept the latest offer. (Note: Last night, a federal bankruptcy judge ordered both parties into mediation.)

Result? Twinkicide. Death by liberalism. Some 18,500 employees are now out of a job. Yes the brand has value, and someone else may pick it up. Small consolation to the abruptly unemployed.

Then there's Newsweek. Folding (so to speak) after 80 years. Yes, it will be online, but no more print version.

Once owned by the Washington Post, the magazine had so hemorrhaged readership -- and as a result advertisers -- that the Post wound up selling it for a dollar. You read that right -- a single dollar bill.

What happened to Newsweek? Doubtless 21st century technology took a toll. But there was something else. A big something else.

Newsweek -- ironically founded by a former reporter for Time -- was ostensibly begun with the goal of publishing the news and some commentary or analysis to go along with it. Eighty years ago, like all manner of other publications of the day, if it ran a news story it was a straight news story. A "just the facts" kind of news story. With the commentary or analysis elsewhere.

But as with its cronies elsewhere in the world of mainstream journalism, by the 1960s Newsweek had begun to change.

There are two eerily similar incidents that have been discussed before in this space which will serve to illustrate, both involving popular liberal Democrats in the White House.

Incident One centered around President John F. Kennedy, and one of his close friends, Ben Bradlee -- the latter then the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek. Long story short, a year after JFK's death Bradlee's sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was mysteriously found murdered on a canal towpath in Washington. Bradlee and his horrified then-wife Toni went to Meyer's Georgetown residence only to find a CIA agent -- a high ranking CIA agent named James Jesus Angleton -- scouring Meyer's living quarters, having staged a break-in. Confronted, he left. And came back later to Meyer's studio -- again to be discovered (in the act of picking the lock) and depart. Eventually Bradlee and his wife located what was being sought. Meyer's diary. Bradlee and wife found the diary and read it. To Bradlee's shock it turned out his separated sister-in-law, herself married to a senior CIA official, had been having a secret affair with JFK. The whole tale was in the diary, including revelations that Meyer and her presidential lover had been smoking pot -- in the White House.

What did Bradlee do? Take this mammoth scoop and put it on the cover of Newsweek? Nah. Instead his wife destroyed the diary -- and Newsweek readers, not to mention the larger world, were none-the-wiser. Until 1976 when a third party who had seen the diary gave the story to, yes, The National Enquirer. In his memoirs Bradlee confessed that every word of the story was true, that he detested the fact the story had ever seen the light of day and had zero regrets about trying to kill it.

Incident Two revolved around President Bill Clinton. The famous story of Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was a Newsweek scoop, the result of the efforts of the magazine's investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. The problem? Newsweek editors in 1998, employing precisely the liberal instinct that seized Bradlee and his JFK scoop, spiked the story. This time, however, the results were very different. Why? The Internet's Matt Drudge got a hold of the fact that Newsweek had this explosive story about the President -- and had spiked it. Drudge promptly ran it on the Drudge Report -- and the rest, as they say, was history.

The point? Newsweek over time earned for itself the reputation not, as its very name "Newsweek" implied, of being a magazine that would report the truth and then analyze. To the contrary it started down a slippery path of deliberatelynot telling the truth in order to protect its favored liberals of the day, or just skewing the news against conservatives -- i.e., part of its readership base.

Over time, this became understood by the general reading public -- and conservative readers stopped buying Newsweek. Presented with innumerable opportunities to right the ship, to restore the magazine to what might be called a "fair and balanced" publication, Newsweek's editors simply insisted on saying something no one believed: that they had no liberal bias.

Back in 2009, the then managing editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, appeared on The O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly grilled him about the magazine's decidedly visible left-wing tilt, visibly incredulous at the response: 

Meacham: "No, I don't -- We're not a partisan magazine. We're just not."

O'Reilly: "Come on."

Meacham: "We're not. We try to be provocative. We try to break news. We try to contribute to the conversation. You can decide whether we do or not."

At the time, the magazine had made a big deal of actor Mel Gibson's marital problems. As NewsBusters pointed out, when O'Reilly challenged Meacham on this the pose of the non-partisan instantly vanished. Why was Gibson's marriage fair game for Newsweek?

Meacham: "The -- Gibson's a literalist, he's a conservative. And he was part of the popular culture, he put himself out there."

O'Reilly: " (Leftwinger) Sean Penn has had recent marital trouble, I didn't see that on Sean....Don't you think that's a little unfair, Jon?"

Meacham: "No, I don't."

So Newsweek kept right on using the magazine advertised as straight news to showcase the latest liberal personality or cause of the moment while not so subtly sticking it to the leading conservatives of the day like Mel Gibson. As the advertisers stopped coming back, as the readership plummeted, the editors' effective answer to change, as Meacham personified in that O'Reilly appearance, was not only "no" but "hell no."

Results: Twinkicide. Death by liberalism. Newsweek in print will soon be no more.

Twinkies and Newsweek aren't the only American institutions to suffer from this phenomenon in recent years either.

Take Mainline Protestant Churches. The Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists and United Church of Christ among others.

Once a central pillar of Protestant America -- not to mention of America itself as we are reminded this Thanksgiving week with celebrations of the Pilgrims -- these denominations have been in a slow but certain decline since the 1960s. In the forty-five years between 1960 and 2005, the Mainline denominations lost some ten million members. In 1970 they were 30% of the American population; by 2009 they had dropped to 15% -- and are headed slowly down, down, down. Individual churches struggle simply to stay alive, when they aren't shuttering their doors outright.

What caused this? It's no accident that the denominational declines coincide exactly with the rise of the far-left in America. Without consultation with their own members, church leaders struck out on journey into the wilds of far-left politics, confusing God with leftist politics.

Exactly as with the bakers and the editors, the men and women of the cloth simply denied the facts, blaming their failures on anything but their own liberalism, as seen here in this jewel from the Episcopal News Service.

Result: Whole liberal-led denominations -- hundreds of years old -- are now headed down the path of Twinkicide.

Then there's the Twinkicide of the public school system.

Here we are in the 21st century. Technology and American innovation and freedom have provided new opportunities for basic education in the form of charter schools, school vouchers, home schooling and public schools.

What is the reaction of the teachers' unions? To throw themselves in front of the progress train, demanding ever greater resources even as their own union rules slowly strangle the quality of public schools, make it impossible to fire incompetent teachers (can you say "rubber rooms"?) and, most glaringly and unforgivingly, ruin the lives of kids trapped in these hell holes through no fault of their own.

So the credibility of good teachers dwindle because of horrendous decisions by their liberal union leaders. And meanwhile the public school systems slowly tank.

Result: The Twinkicide of the American public school system.

Then there's the state of California.

The place is a disaster. Once a rich state, the center of the American universe with California Dreamin' an anthem to the state's magnet-like ability to draw people from not only around the country but the world to its glamorous precincts, it is now busily driving people away as it slowly sinks. Sinks into a morass of high taxes, out-of-control debt, lousy schools and fleeing businesses. Only this month Governor Jerry Brown sold his tax-addicted constituents that yes, what California needed was another tax! Up went taxes -- again -- on higher incomes, while a sales tax increase was approved for everyone. The state has a $16 billion deficit while carrying the highest debt load of any state in the nation -- $618 billion. Notes the Weekly Standard's Charlotte Allen:

That latter amount includes up to $500 billion in unfunded pension liabilities for 220,000 state employees plus billions in unpaid bills, delayed payments to schools, and amounts raided from dedicated funds to cover general expenses.

All of these woes and more are sending the state headlong into a swan dive in an empty concrete swimming pool. Will the liberals who have managed this debacle change course? Admit liberalism is driving the state inevitably, nor to mention faster by the day, into bankruptcy? Are you kidding? They would prefer… all together now… 

Twinkicide! Death by liberalism is the new California Dreamin'.

As if all this and more isn't cause for concern, there are the now familiar Twinkicidal instincts that are surfacing in Washington.

Obamacare being the obvious example of the moment.

The other day, the Cato Institute's Michael Tanner focused on one unintended consequence from Obamacare just in the New York City area alone. Writing in the New York Post, Tanner told the story of one Zane Tankel, who runs forty Applebee's in New York and environs. Right after the presidential election, Tankel announced he was calling a halt to two things: hiring more employees and building more Applebee's restaurants.

Why? Obamacare, of course. Applebee's just can't afford the costs. Writes Tanner:

Under ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time workers must provide health insurance for all their workers, paying at least 65% of the cost of a family policy or 85% of the cost of an individual plan. Moreover, the insurance must meet the federal government's requirements in terms of what benefits are included, meaning that many businesses that offer insurance to their workers today will have to change to new, more expensive plans.

He goes on: 

Suppose that a firm with 49 employees does not provide health benefits. Hiring one more worker will trigger the mandate. The company would now have to provide insurance coverage to all 50 workers or pay a tax penalty…. Under the circumstances, how likely is the company to hire that 50th worker? Or, if a company already has 50 workers, isn't the company likely to lay off one employee? Or cut hours and make some employees part time, thus getting under the 50 employee cap? Indeed, a study by Mercer found that 18% of companies were likely to do exactly that. It's worth noting that in France, another country where numerous government regulations kick in at 50 workers, there are 1,500 companies with 48 employees and 1,600 with 49 employees, but just 660 with 50 and only 500 with 51.

In other words, a lot of people are going to lose their full-time jobs, and expansion -- building new Applebee's in this case -- will simply stop dead. Tanner cites the growing number of restaurant companies that are doing some version of what Applebee's is now doing, from Papa John's Pizza to the Olive Garden to the Red Lobster. In addition to going this route, Denny's is adding a 5% tax to cover its costs -- a tax that is quickly being tagged the "Obama Surcharge."

So why is this happening? Why deliberately send the already unacceptably high unemployment rate even higher? Because, as all remember, in the maniacal push to pass Obamacare the consequences were damned. Liberals were warned as to the results -- and they simply didn't care.

Which is to say, Applebee's, Denny's, Papa John's, the Olive Garden and Red Lobster are now victims of the Twinkicide mindset. They may be among the first -- but they most certainly are not going to be the last.

Which in turn raises the greatest concern of all -- the future of America itself.

What America is confronting here with the lemming-like phenomenon that is Twinkicide is a group of people who simply are obsessed with liberalism. Addicted to it in just the fashion a crack addict is addicted to crack cocaine.

Like a crack addict, they could care less about the consequences of their actions -- even if it ensures their own death. Mesmerized by liberalism, they march resolutely off the nearest cliff available, mass suicide be damned.

They could be bakers or magazine editors. They could be Mainline Protestant church leaders or public school teachers. They could be California politicians -- and yes, even California voters. In Washington they are the zealots behind Obamacare.

What all of these people have in common is that they will impose liberalism no matter the consequences. Even if it means they march straight off the cliff. And in the case of America, taking the rest of us with them.

Ironically, for all the hysterical shouts in foreign lands of "Death to America," there is in fact a seriously growing threat to America right here at home.

Twinkicide.

Death by liberalism.

Book Review: 'Inferno' by Max Hastings

BUY THE BOOK

Infernal Regions

By G. Tracy Mehan, III on 11.19.12 @ 6:05AM

American Spectator

Who really defeated Hitler: the Western democracies, or the mass and brute force of the Red Army?

Inferno: The World At War, 1939-1945
By Max Hastings
(Knopf, 729 pages, $35)

"At 3:15 A.M. Berlin time on 22 June 1941, Russian border guards on the Bug River Bridge at Kolden were summoned by their German counterparts 'to discuss important matters,' and machine-gunned as they approached," writes Max Hastings on the commencement of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

This routine bit of duplicity and disregard for human life began "the defining event of the war" and, ultimately, the complete destruction of Hitler's Germany, as described by Hastings in his Inferno: The World At War, 1939-1945 (recently released in paperback).

This volume is the culmination of Hastings' long career as a historian of the Second World War, "this greatest and most terrible of all human experiences," beginning with Bomber Command (1979) and followed by seven other books on all aspects of the conflict, including one on the defeat of Japan. Avoiding the detailed military narrative of the author's other works, Inferno takes a synoptic view of the war and surveys the "big picture, the context of events" in order to "illuminate the conflict's significance for a host of ordinary people of many societies…" To accomplish this, Hastings draws on eyewitness accounts of soldiers, civilians, journalists, peasants, and wartime victims that were contained in letters, diaries, journals, and news accounts in numerous languages.

"Many people witnessed spectacles comparable with Renaissance painters' conception of the inferno to which the damned were consigned; human beings torn to fragments of flesh and bone; cities blasted into ruble; ordered communities sundered into dispersed human particles," says Hastings. "Almost everything which civilized peoples take for granted in time of peace was swept aside, above all the expectation of being protected from violence."

Yes, the violence was unimaginable then and now. Hastings reckons that "at least 60 million were terminated by death." An average of 27,000 people perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945. Between 1937 and 1945, China lost 15 million lives. Yugoslavia suffered 1 million dead, including those lost in a concurrent civil war. Even on the American home front, 100,000 wartime workers lost limbs in accidental, compared to 17,000 combat amputees.

Hastings provides a panoramic tour of the war, from the invasion of Poland, Norway, and France, through the final collapse of Japanese resistance after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But he deftly combines this with very personal and wrenching stories of human beings caught up in an evil they do not -- cannot -- comprehend. During the final battle for Berlin, with the victorious Soviet army "embarking on an orgy of celebration, rape and destruction on a scale such as Europe had not witnessed since the seventeenth century," he offers this report from a Berlin woman regarding her neighbor, a baker who "comes stumbling towards me down the hall…white as his flour, holding out his hands: 'They have my wife…' His voice breaks. For a second I feel I'm acting in a play. A middle-class baker can't possibly move like that, can't speak with such emotion, put so much feeling into his voice, bare his soul that way, his heart torn. I've never seen anyone but great actors do that."

When Singapore fell to the Japanese, 22 Australian nurses escaped, only to be captured on a Dutch Island. "As they were driven into the sea to be machine-gunned, the last words of their matron Irene Drummond were recorded by the sole survivor: 'Chin up, girls. I'm proud of you and I love you all.'"

These moving, grim tales, laced throughout the text of Inferno, make a sad story even more human, tragic, and forlorn.

There are several cruel and ironic themes that Hastings articulates throughout the book. The invasion of Poland was thecasus belli for the French and British to declare war on Germany. Yet, Poland was the price Stalin demanded for waging a merciless war on the Eastern Front, a monumental one at that. French ambivalence regarding the Allied cause is another theme, especially given the romanticized role of the Resistance in post-war memories.

Most cruel of all, given the years of blood and steel that followed, was the realization on the part of both the Japanese and German high commands -- very early in the war -- that neither could actually win the struggle. For instance, once the Germans failed to take Moscow in 1941, the Wehrmacht generals understood that the best they could hope for was to hold out for favorable terms from the Americans and British. Hitler also understood this reality but had no choice but to fight on to the death.

The most significant theme emphasized throughout Max Hastings' compelling history is the overwhelming nature of the savage war on the Eastern Front, which dwarfed Allied military efforts in Italy and France. So vast was the spilling of Soviet and German blood and treasure that Hastings makes this unequivocal judgment in the concluding chapter of the book:

The Soviet Union revealed an industrial and military capability that would have enabled it to complete the destruction of Hitler's war machine even had the Western Allies never landed in Italy or France, though their interventions hastened the end. There is a powerful argument that only a warlord as bereft of scruples or compassion as Stalin, presiding over a society in which ruthlessness was even more institutionalized than in Germany, could have destroyed Nazism. Stalin proved a supremely effective tyrant, as Hitler was not.

The war on the Russian front defies belief. The Wehrmacht, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, assumed the starvation of at least 30 million Russians in order to feed the German army as it penetrated the heartland of the Soviet Union. Most of the 3.5 million Soviet POWs were starved or shot, and this was reciprocated in kind by Stalin's forces. At any given time, the Russian front extended anywhere from 900 to 1,400 miles, from Leningrad to Odessa. At one point the Soviets were losing 44,000 soldiers per day.

Yet, between June 1941 and May 1944, the month before D-Day, the Germans suffered an average of 60,000 men killed each month in the east.

Hastings describes the fierce battle for Budapest in which the Russians suffered 80,000 dead and a quarter of a million wounded. During the siege, 38,000 civilians died, and tens of thousands more were deported to the Soviet Union for forced labor. Many of them never returned. The German and Hungarian forces lost 40,000 men, and 63,000 more were taken prisoner.

"This savage, futile battle would have been accounted an epic had it taken place on the Anglo-American front," writes Max Hastings. "As it was, only the Hungarians took much notice of its horrors, then or later."

Benjamin Schwarz, the literary editor for the Atlantic, wrote a provocative book review of current and emerging scholarship on the Second World War entitled, "Stalin's Gift," in which he argued for a reorientation or reappraisal of our understanding of the conflict:

It's time for those (mostly male) readers interested in the Second World War to put down the umpteenth account of D-Day and turn to the new crop of books on the most colossal conflict the world has ever seen: the German-Soviet clash on the Eastern Front. Since the late 1980s, a historiographical revolution has been underway, as scholars fundamentally alter their understanding of this epic struggle, which killed 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians and nearly 4 million Wehrmacht troops. They aren't merely revising an established narrative; they're discovering new facets of the conflict -- even entire battles -- that had been lost to history.

Both Schwarz and Hastings comment on the role of the NKVD in maintaining discipline in the Soviet ranks and inflicting harsh punishment for desertion. The Soviets executed more than 158,000 soldiers for desertion.

Citing the British historian Norman Davies, Schwarz observed that, for four years, more than 400 Red Army and German divisions fought over a front of 1,000 miles. "At its most intense, the war in the West was fought between 15 Allied and 15 Wehrmacht divisions," wrote Schwarz. "Eighty-five percent of the German military dead fell there; in July 1943, in the decisive battle of the war, the Soviets permanently broke the Wehrmacht's capacity for large-scale attack at Kursk, 'the one name,' Davies properly asserts, 'which all historians of the Second World War should remember.'"

Schwarz continues: "So…the most odious criminal regime in Europe's history was defeated by an even more murderous regime, if numbers are the yardstick -- which significantly tarnishes any notion of the 'Good War.'" He concludes his essay with a quote from historian Geoffrey Roberts, who ventures to say that "Stalin…saved the world for democracy."

The reappraisal of the slaughter in eastern Europe is also reflected in Timothy Snyder's powerful, daunting bookBloodlands (2010), which treats the killing fields between Berlin and Moscow, from 1933 to 1945, as a single, intertwined history of 14 million murdered souls. The story encompasses not just the Holocaust, but also Stalin's starvation of 3.3 million in the Ukraine, the extermination of Polish elites, and other assorted horrors. "This is a history of political mass murder," writes Snyder. "A quarter of them were killed before the Second World War even began. A further two hundred thousand died between 1939 and 1941, while Germany and the Soviet Union were not only at peace, but allies." Again, cruelty and irony present themselves in contemporary histories of these infernal regions.

Max Hastings' final assessment of the Second World War is very much in line with Benjamin Schwarz and the historians he surveyed.

Hastings recognizes the valor and contribution of the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Army Air Force in defeating the Japanese. He applauds the sacrifices of American, British, and Commonwealth forces in Italy and France. He rightly praises the code breakers at Bletchley Park, the courage of the RAF, the heroism of the Poles and Norwegians, and the skill and fortitude of the Royal Navy.

But, in the end, Max Hastings believes it was the Soviet war of mass rather than maneuver -- of brute force, heedless of the loss of human life -- that, in the final analysis, broke the back of the German army and with it the Third Reich.

"Whatever the limitations of the Red Army's weapons, training, tactics and commanders, Soviet culture armoured its forces to meet the Wehrmacht with a resolution the softer citizens of the democracies could not match," he writes. A more unsettling conclusion to a masterful history of the war can hardly be imagined.

About the Author

G. Tracy Mehan, III served at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the administrations of both Presidents Bush. He is a consultant in Arlington, Virginia, and an adjunct professor at George Mason University School of Law.

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/11/19/infernal-regions

Another Palestinian fraud exposed

By Arnold Ahlert
http://frontpagemag.com
November 19, 2012

It is as predictable as a sunrise. Despite more than 11,000 rockets and mortars fired into Israel by Hamas since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 — including more than 800 rockets this year alone — as soon as Israel begins to defend itself from attack, it is invariable cast as the cold-blooded aggressor, and mainstream media salivate to find the evidence. An outrageous example of this came recently from CNN, which reported that a dead Palestinian child was killed by a missile and that Israel was likely responsible. Yet CNN is far from alone in looking for ways to brand Israel as the villain in the latest outbreak of violence.
The picture shown above (and here) has been broadcast all over the world. The dead body of four-year-old Mahmoud Sadallah is being cradled by Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil and Gaza’s Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh during a media presentation at Shifa hospital in Gaza City, last Friday. “The boy, the martyr, whose blood is still on my hands and clothes, is something that we cannot keep silent about,” said Kandil, who then promised to defend the Palestinian people.
As the Boston Globe was determined to point out, Sadallah’s death “has drawn attention to the dangers Gaza’s children face in this crowded urban battle zone,” further noting that such children “seem to be everywhere in the current round of cross-border fighting between Israel and Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers.” What the Boston Globe and others are equally determined to underplay, or ignore completely, is why there are any children at all in these “crowded urban battle zones.”
A photo shown here gets to the heart of Hamas’s propaganda strategy, as well as their complete disregard for the well-being of their own citizens — especially children. The picture shows a Fajr-5 missile launch pad located in the heavily populated Zeitoun district of Gaza. Within a half-block of the launcher, designed to fire long range rockets into the Jewish State, there is a children’s playground, a mosque, two civilian factories and a gas station.
On Wednesday, Israel carried out a surgical strike on that pad as part of their Operation Pillar of Defense. They had an excellent reason for doing so. The Fajr-5, developed by Iran, has a range of almost 47 miles — meaning it can hit Tel Aviv and elsewhere in the heavily populated areas of central Israel. On Saturday, Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system intercepted a Fajr-5 missile heading for Tel Aviv. This was Hamas’s third attempted attack on Tel Aviv in three days. Moreover, Palestinian terrorists nearly hit Jerusalem with a rocket for the first time in decades on Friday.
Thus, Israel is faced with a clear, but unenviable, choice. It can either allow such missile launchers to remain intact, and leave Israeli civilians in its two largest cities and elsewhere completely vulnerable to an organization whose charter calls for Israel’s annihilation, or it can strike critical targets as precisely as possible and endure the inevitable claims of “unnecessary” civilian casualties that feed the Hamas propaganda machine.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper was more than willing to abet that propaganda, much of which consists of making Hamas’s aggression and Israel’s attempt to defend itself morally equivalent. After noting Israel has the upper hand in a “straight fight,” the paper is seemingly delighted to report that “the Palestinians have used a weapon which gives them a rare if short-lived advantage–a rocket (the Fajr-5) which can strike at Israel’s civilian heartland.” The paper further notes that the Fajr-5 “is not a game-changer, but it does even out the stakes.”
Fortunately, even as the effort to blame Sadallah’s death on Israel was intensifying, the story began to fall apart. As the Telegraphreported, “The highly publicised death of four-year-old Mohammed Sadallah appeared to have been the result of a misfiring home-made rocket, not a bomb dropped by Israel.” The paper further revealed that the “Palestinian Centre for Human Rights who visited the site on Saturday said they believed that the explosion was caused by a Palestinian rocket.” Even the boy’s mother said it was “possible he was struck by a rocket fired by Palestinian fighters.”
Though this outrageous example of prejudiced reporting has been exposed as a fraud, rest assured the media is still intent on dictating exactly how far Israel can go in terms of defending itself, and a possible ground invasion is not part of that agenda. The Telegraph notes that there has been “broad international support so far for the bombing campaign against rocket sites, but that could wane if a ground invasion led to a sharp rise in the number of people killed.”
The New York Times didn’t even support Israel’s initial aerial attacks, characterizing them as “one of the most ferocious assaults on Gaza since its invasion four years ago.” “Israel has a right to defend itself, but it’s hard to see how Wednesday’s operation could be the most effective way of advancing its long-term interests,” the paper editorialized.
The Times also referred to Ahmed al-Jabari, the Hamas terrorist killed in the initial attack, as a “top military commander” instead a thug involved in multiple terrorist attacks against Israel, including a 1998 attack on a school bus that killed two children.
Reuters also echoed the limited response refrain, noting that “Israel’s operation has so far drawn Western support for what U.S. and European leaders have called its right to self-defence, but there was also a growing number of appeals from them to seek an end to the hostilities.” And the Associated Press is reporting that president Obama was of like mind as well. ”If we see a further escalation of the situation in Gaza, the likelihood of us getting back on any kind of peace track that leads to a two-state solution is going to be pushed off way into the future,” Obama contended.
All of this nonsense reflects an ugly double-standard. Not once has the so-called international community ever condemned Hamas for regularly firing rockets into Israel over the span of eight years. Among the global elites, it is apparently taken as a matter of course that Israelis must live under constant threat of bombardments that have been responsible for 30 deaths, 1500 injuries, and hundreds of thousands of traumatized citizens.
It is only when Israel reaches a breaking point, and seeks to defend itself, that the international community suddenly becomes concerned with casualties — Palestinian casualties. Until such escalation occurs, Hamas can continue firing missiles with impunity, even as these paragons of “enlightened thinking” remain willfully uninterested.
Whether such predictable responses amount to moral cowardice or anti-Semitism, it feeds the anti-Israel media complex critical to Hamas’s war strategy. Unlike Israel, or any civilized people, Hamas is buoyed by collateral damage from Israeli strikes because it allows them to foment hatred of their enemy, increase international pressure on Israel to not retaliate, and garner sympathy for their terrorist cause. Lost in the human interest stories are the facts that it was they who initiated the conflict in the first place and used women and children as human shields.
Hamas’s Gaza Interior Minister, Fathi Hamad, confirmed this strategy in a video recorded in 2008. “For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: ‘We desire death like you desire life.’”
For those quick to make moral equivalency between Palestinian terrorism and Israel’s “ferocious assaults” in its own defense, an average of two to three missile launches per day is likely seen as a reasonable tradeoff for peace’s sake. For Israelis, however, it is becoming more and more obvious that they comprise the only country in the world expected to live under such “peaceful” conditions — and they are losing patience with the game and are willing to take matters into their own hands.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Here’s How — As With This Israel-Hamas War — Western Elites Are Baffled by the Middle East

By Barry Rubin
PJ Media
November 17, 2012

The elite currently in power in the Western mass media will never comprehend the Middle East. There is a problem with bias, for sure, but the big issue is the impenetrable ignorance of the very people entrusted with explaining the region to others. They insist on imposing their own misconceptions on the situation while ignoring the evidence.

Consider Janine Zacharia. What a distinguished resume: Jerusalem bureau chief and Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post (2009-2011), chief diplomatic correspondent for Bloomberg News (2005-2009), and before that five years working for the Jerusalem Post in Washington, D.C., and another five years working for Reuters and other publications from Jerusalem. Right now she’s a visiting lecturer at Stanford University in communications.

Surely, such a person must understand the region’s issues, and if anyone isn’t going to have an anti-Israel bias in the mass media it would be her. And she isn’t anti-Israel in a conscious, political sense. Indeed, she obviously views herself as sympathetic. Rather, her assumptions make her type of views inevitably anti-Israel and, more broadly, inevitably destructive of U.S. interests on other issues.

Here’s her article in Slate. The title is “Why Israel’s Gaza Campaign is Doomed.” Not why this response is the best of a set of difficult options; not why the world should support Israel; not why Hamas should be removed from power with international support but why Israel is wrong and stupid to fight. “Doomed” is a strong word.

The subhead — adapted from Zacharia’s text — is “Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to bomb Hamas militants will leave Israel more isolated, insecure, and alone.” Not the decision of Israel’s unanimous leadership including first and foremost its military and defense experts but that of a prime minister who now plays a role for the American media most closely approximated to that held by former President George W. Bush.

And by defending itself against an onslaught of rockets — 120 in one week — Israel will be worse off even though, by the way, every Western country I’m aware of has supported Israel. Why will Israel be more isolated, insecure, and alone? Because the unspoken assumption of the Western media elite is that anyone who uses force, even in self-defense, ends up worse off.

It is quite reasonable to state that the campaign will not end the problem. Everyone in Israel and in Israel’s leadership and all the generals and Netanyahu know this very well. They also know that a country that does not defend itself will end up doomed, isolated, insecure, and alone.

They also know the best that can be expected given this situation is to force Hamas to deescalate for two or three years before the next round. One of the goals of the operation is to destroy the large military stockpiles — especially longer-range missiles — that Hamas has accumulated since 2009. Thus, Hamas will have to start all over again to smuggle in weapons. The next time they start a war it will be from a far weaker position than if they had not taken such losses.

Much of the Western elite no longer understands concepts which their predecessors took for granted during the last two centuries. You can go back even further than that to Joshua 7: 8-9 when Joshua prays after a military defeat:

What can I say after Israel has turned tail before its enemies? When the Canaanites and all the inhabitants of the land hear of this, they will turn upon us and wipe out our very name from the earth.

Zacharia, however, faithfully represents the current standpoint of the Western elite. Here is her prescription:

Israel needs a far more sophisticated, diplomatic, long-term strategic policy for dealing with Gaza and all the threats around it—from Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and perhaps Egypt. A new Israeli approach may have to include a willingness to at least try talking to Hamas, which is fighting its own internal battle against even more radical, anti-Israel groups in the Gaza Strip. It may mean putting more pressure on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, languishing in irrelevance in Ramallah, to make peace with Hamas so there can be negotiations with Israel and a permanent end to this rocket-war madness.

Let’s list her arguments:

• The “Palestinian militant groups” want to drag Israel into an all-out war. Therefore, she reasons, Israel is foolish to engage in such a war. But the other side wanting a war that Israel prefers to avoid has been a common feature of Israeli history, as in 1948, 1967, and 2006. The Palestinian leadership and Arab states misjudge the balance of forces (that is, they don’t know they will lose) or feel such a losing war is worthwhile to mobilize popular support and to prove the individual group involved (in this case Hamas) is the best and most courageous of Fedayeen.
• The other side consists of “militant groups.” The problem with avoiding the word “terrorist” is not that it sanitizes those attacking Israel but that it downgrades their ideology and intentions. Hamas openly declares it will destroy Israel and commit genocide against Jews. Terrorism is a tactic. What lies behind it is a desire to murder all the civilians on the enemy side, whether or not any specific attack succeeds in killing a few of them.

If you don’t understand the extremism of the enemy, you don’t understand the enemy. And if you don’t understand the enemy, you have no idea of what to do in response. This is precisely the problem of the Western policy toward the Middle East and revolutionary Islamism.

For example, there is a readiness to believe that the assassination of a U.S. ambassador in Benghazi (and on September 11 to boot!) is the result of anger over a video rather than a concerted campaign to fundamentally transform Libya and the Middle East.

But back to Zacharia.

• The fault is with Israel. It doesn’t have a proper diplomatic policy, you see, because there’s no willingness to talk to Hamas. Does Hamas have character of its own? Might it have an ideology and goals of its own? Might Hamas be to Israel what al-Qaiea is to the United States?

If one actually knew anything about Hamas — and Israelis have three decades of experience in studying, fighting, and dealing with it — the idea of a negotiated solution would be ridiculous. Incidentally, Israel has negotiated truces with Hamas. Under normal conditions, Hamas just violates them and up to a point Israel looks the other way or responds in a small way. Periodically, Hamas decides on a big offensive and that leads to war.

Yet Zacharia blames Israel for not being good enough to negotiate a deal with a group whose televised children’s shows call for the physical extinction of Israel, the mass murder of its inhabitants, and future careers for kiddies as suicide bombers.

• Hamas is fighting even more radical groups in the Gaza Strip and therefore it must be moderate or at least potentially so.

That isn’t really true. Of course, Hamas cracks down on groups that attack its own rule or prove to be inconvenient. But far more often it cooperates with Islamic Jihad and even al-Qaeda affiliated groups. These attack Israel with Hamas’s cooperation and forbearance and then Hamas can claim innocence, thus waging war and claiming it isn’t doing anything at all. This is a transparent ploy but one that, as with Zacharia, many influential people in the West buy hook, line, and sinker.

• Israel can “put pressure” on Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank, and end the attacks from the Gaza Strip permanently. Yet anybody — much less a journalist who spent years dealing with the Middle East — should know that Abbas has zero influence in the Gaza Strip and any deal he makes (and he doesn’t intend to make one) will have no effect on Hamas or the Gaza Strip.

Moreover, Israel cannot put too much pressure on Abbas because the Obama administration, which puts on no pressure of its own, won’t allow it to do so. In addition, Israel worries more about Abbas being overthrown by Hamas than about his combating the group. Let’s remember that Abbas himself has repeatedly made deals with Hamas that the “militant group” has violated.

In other words, what Zacharia writes — and this is common throughout Western academic, media, and governmental circles — is completely absurd. The solution not being taken up is to overthrow Hamas just like the Taliban was overthrown in Afghanistan, though even that didn’t solve the problems in the latter country.

But there is zero support in the West for bringing down Hamas. President Barack Obama helped install a pro-Hamas regime in Egypt. And the man who never pressured Abbas pressured Israel to reduce sanctions on the Gaza Strip, thus helping Hamas remain in power so it can continue firing rockets at Israel.

I do not expect the mass media to improve nor do I have any hope of educating the journalists who write this kind of thing. They are not going to change in the near or even medium-term future. Hence, they will be ignored instead.

Equally, the governments who follow this kind of line will have no effect — at least no positive effect — on regional problems. The new feature of the last few years is that the U.S. government has contributed to making things much worse.

And that’s why there will be no “permanent end” to this rocket war madness or all of the other varieties of madness that are getting worse in the region.

The president knew truth about Benghazi

By Jennifer Rubin
Right Turn
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
November 16, 2012

In a blockbuster report, John Solomon, the former Associated Press and Post reporter, has ferreted out the president’s daily brief that informed him within 72 hours of the Sept. 11 attack that the Benghazi attack was a jihadist operation.

Citing officials directly familiar with the information, Solomon writes in the Washington Guardian that Obama and other administration officials were told that “that the attack was likely carried out by local militia and other armed extremists sympathetic to al-Qaida in the region.”

He adds:

The details from the CIA and Pentagon assessments of the killing of Ambassador Chris [Stevens] were far more specific, more detailed and more current than the unclassified talking points that UN Ambassador Susan Rice and other officials used five days after the attack to suggest to Americans that an unruly mob angry over an anti-Islamic video was to blame, officials said.

Most of the details affirming al-Qaida links were edited or excluded from the unclassified talking points used by Rice in appearances on news programs the weekend after the attack, officials confirmed Friday. Multiple agencies were involved in excising information, doing so because it revealed sources and methods, dealt with classified intercepts or involved information that was not yet fully confirmed, the officials said.

Solomon cautions that there were bits of evidence pointing to a spontaneous attack but, as Eli Lake of the Daily Beast and others have reported, he writes: “Among the early evidence cited in the briefings to the president and other senior officials were intercepts showing some of the participants were known members or supporters of Ansar al-Sharia — the al-Qaida-sympathizing militia in Libya — and the AQIM, which is a direct affiliate of al-Qaida in northern Africa, the officials said.”

How could the president and his senior staff then have allowed (or rather, sent) Rice to go out to tell an entirely different tale to the American people on Sept. 16 on five TV shows?

This report indicates that the president certainly knew that Benghazi wasn’t a rogue movie review gone bad. He had information that plainly spelled out what was later confirmed by additional intelligence. If this information was too confidential to share with the public, at the very leastthe president and others should not have mislead voters.

This is a full-blown scandal, and in light of this information, the press corps’s slothful indifference to uncovering the truth at Wednesday’s news conference with Obama is all the more shocking. It is time for the president to come clean. The scandal has now enveloped the Oval Office and will define his second term, if not resolved satisfactorily.

The irony of this is that Rice may well have been used as a patsy, unaware that she was sent out to spin a misleading tale. My colleagueDana Milbank recounts Rice’s long-standing inability to get along with others and to be circumspect in her pronouncements:

It’s true that, in her much-criticized TV performance, she was reciting talking points given to her by the intelligence agencies. But that’s the trouble. Rice stuck with her points even though they had been contradicted by the president of the Libyan National Assembly, who, on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ just before Rice, said there was “no doubt” that the attack on Americans in Benghazi “was preplanned.” Rice rebutted the Libyan official, arguing — falsely, it turned out — that there was no evidence of such planning. . . . Obama can do better at State than Susan Rice.

Frankly the same could be said of many national security positions at this point. The American people made their choice in November on the president, but it now appears they were duped regarding the real facts concerning Benghazi. What are we going to do about that?