Hillary's Worst Crime Was Against the 'Filmmaker'

By Jack Cashill
http://www.americanthinker.com/
October 26, 2015



(Photo: Getty Images)

It would be as ethically bankrupt for the Democrats to nominate Hillary Clinton after Benghazi as it would have been for the Republicans to nominate Richard Nixon after the Watergate hearings.

More bankrupt actually. No one died at Watergate, and the only people who went to prison were the ones who committed the crimes. At Benghazi, of course, four Americans died, and the only American who went to prison did so to help Hillary sell a lie.

Before Hillary’s testimony Thursday in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, her supporters could take some comfort in thinking that there had been genuine confusion about the cause of the assault on the Benghazi consulate.

After all, as Ohio Republican Jim Jordan made clear, it was Hillary who first introduced the narrative that an anti-Muslim video inspired the attack. “It started with you, Madame Secretary," said Jordan.

“Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet," said Clinton in a release posted on the evening of September 11. "The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. . . . But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.”

To be sure, this was the same Hillary Clinton who, a year earlier, happily applauded Broadway’s “Book of Mormon,” a scandalously potty-mouthed riff on the Mormon religion with charming lyrics like “F*** you, God, in the a**, mouth, and c***.”

As Jordan also made clear, however, Hillary never believed for a moment that the video was responsible. He shared her communication that same night with the president of Egypt. "We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest," wrote Clinton. Later that night, in an email to daughter Chelsea, she pinned the attack on an “Al Queda-like group.”

In a semantic pirouette worthy of her husband, Hillary told Jordan that she never did actually blame the video. “I said some have sought to justify the attack because of the video. I used those words deliberately, not to ascribe a motive to every attacker but as a warning to those across the region that there was no justification for further attacks," she lied. 

In real life, however, Hillary sold the false video narrative hard in the weeks after the attack, most disgracefully to the families of the dead. At a small ceremony upon the return of the caskets to Andrews Air Force base, Hillary shook the hand of Charles Wood, father of Benghazi hero Ty Woods, and said, “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested.”

In this rare instance, Hillary was as good as her word. She and Obama set out to identify and punish the maker of that video, and they did so with a speed and severity that the attackers themselves were spared. Scarier still, to the degree the major media noticed, they cheered.

In a phone conversation I had last year with video maker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, he had one pressing question:  “Why did the government release the deal? Why did they put my life in danger?”

Nakoula was referring to a plea deal he made with the federal government after his arrest in June 2009 for his role in a check-kiting scheme. A thirty year resident of the United States and a citizen, the native Egyptian agreed to cooperate with authorities in nailing the scheme’s mastermind, Eiad Salameh.

Given that Salameh was still on the loose at the time, and a genuine threat to Nakoula if he knew the terms of the arrangement, the sentencing transcript was sealed. That transcript remained sealed at least until the trailer for the video titled "The Real Life of Muhammad" was uploaded to the Internet on July 1, 2012 and likely for the next few months thereafter.

“I owe this country my life,” Nakoula, a Coptic Christian, told me. “I don’t want to see Americans treated like Coptic Christians. If they watch my movie, maybe this won’t happen.” Although there has been speculation that Nakoula was some sort of double agent, I believe his motives for making the video are as stated. If so, the video represented the kind of political speech the First Amendment was designed to protect.

Nor did the video violate YouTube/ Google’s terms of service regarding hate speech. Said Google after the controversy erupted, “The video stays up because it is against the Islam religion but not Muslim people.”

In his Rose Garden speech on the morning of September 12, 2012, President Barack Obama reinforced Hillary’s false narrative. “Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths,” said Obama in an indirect but obvious dig at the video.  “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.” 

Less than 48 hours after that Rose Garden speech, federal apparatchiks leaked the key documents that the federal government would use to bury Nakoula. Key among them was the previously sealed sentencing transcript that the Smoking Gun published on September 14 under the all too revealing headline, “Producer Of Anti-Islam Film Was Fed Snitch.”

Just as troubling, the apparatchiks may have been sharing their strategy for silencing Nakoula with the New York Times. According to the Times, “Earlier in the week, federal officials appeared to be investigating whether Mr. Nakoula had been the person who uploaded the video to YouTube.” Earlier in the week? The Times reported this on September 15, just three days after the smoke had cleared in Benghazi.

By this date too, the Times was fully aware of the terms of Nakoula’s parole. Were Nakoula the one who uploaded the video, argued the Times, “He would have violated the terms of his sentencing in a conviction in a 2010 check-kiting case, which includes restrictions against his using the Internet without permission from a probation officer.”

Less than two weeks after the Smoking Gun article, a federal judge ordered Nakoula to be detained without bail for various parole violations, the most salient of them the very one that the Times had predicted, unauthorized use of the Internet.

When I called Nakoula last year, he was still confined to a halfway house in Orange County, California. Although relieved to have been sprung from a federal pen deep in West Texas where I first contacted him, Nakoula did not understand why the feds retained him six months after he was supposed to have been freed. “Why did you punish me again?” he asked angrily of the Justice Department. “Why? It was not in original judgment.”

Although the feds and their media allies insisted Nakoula was arrested for parole violations, the White House sent him to prison both to appease the Muslim world and to remove Nakoula from the reach of those very few people in the media who might want to give him a fair hearing.

“Hillary takes victory lap following performance at Benghazi hearing,” read the headline of the New York Post. I wonder what Nakoula thinks of that.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/10/hillarys_worst_crime_was_against_the_filmmaker.html#ixzz3pgl724XS
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Still waiting for the truth

BY STEPHEN F. HAYES
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
October 23, 2015



Twenty-five minutes before the start of Thursday’s hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Charles Woods stood alone behind the witness table, marveling at the chaos around him. A gaggle of still photographers was rehearsing their movements for the arrival of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Young people in smart outfits scurried about with stern looks on their faces, as if the urgency of their movement reflected the importance of their various errands. 

Woods, a handsome man with a shock of near-white hair, wore a black suit and yellow and black flowered tie in the style of his native Hawaii. He was nearly run over by a young woman in heels and in a hurry, who scowled at him briefly for standing in the aisle as she maneuvered around him, a look she probably wouldn’t have given him if she’d had any idea who he was and why he was here. 

Woods is the father of Tyrone Woods, a retired Navy Seal killed in the attacks on Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Shortly before the hearing began, I asked him what he hoped to learn from the hearing. 

“The truth, hopefully,” he said, not sounding hopeful at all.

He was right to be skeptical. 

Charles Woods has been waiting a long time for the truth. He met his son’s body at Joint Base Andrews, three days after the attacks, at a solemn ceremony in just outside Washington, D.C. He first met Clinton at that brief memorial service. He remembers it well, in part, he says, because he took notes immediately after he spoke with her. 

When I asked him about that day as we waited for the hearing to begin, he pulled a small leather black datebook from his pocket – maybe the size of a calculator, with 2012 engraved in gold on the front – as he recalled her words. He began reading from the entry that started on September 14, the day of the ceremony, and continued into the space for the following day. It ran just five or six lines, written in pencil.

He recorded Clinton’s exact words. “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son,” he read. Then he looked up. “I remember those words: ‘who was responsible for the death of your son.’ She was blaming him and blaming the movie.”

Woods was skeptical at the time that she was telling the truth. His doubts were validated with each new revelation of the administration’s post-attack dissembling. But he was shocked by what he learned in the hearing Thursday. 

At 11:12 p.m. on September 11, 2012, the night of the attacks, Hillary Clinton wrote to her daughter, Chelsea, and noted that the compound in Benghazi had been attacked by “an al Quaeda-like group.” She did not mention a video, as she had in her public statement, released by the State Department an hour earlier. 

The following day, September 12, 2012, Clinton spoke with Egyptian prime minister Hesham Kandil. Their discussion was captured by a State Department note-taker, whose job is to record conversations among high-level diplomats by producing a near-verbatim summary. 

“We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film,” Clinton explained to Kandil, according to the State Department memo. “It was a planned attack – not a protest.” 

Within 36 hours of the attack, Clinton had privately contradicted what would become the three main components of the Obama administration’s post-attack narrative. Clinton said “it was a planned attack,” but the administration publicly claimed it was a “spontaneous demonstration” that spun out of control. Clinton said an “al Qaeda-like group” had conducted the attacks, but the administration publicly downplayed ties to al Qaeda. And Clinton said the attack “had nothing to do with the film,” but the administration publicly built its case around the claim that the video was central to the attacks. 

Those words hit Woods like a punch to the gut. “That was two days before she told me that they would get the filmmaker,” he said during a break in the hearing after those revelations. 

In a hearing that lasted from mid-morning well into the evening, the truth was an afterthought. The coverage of the hearings – from the earliest tweets to the final page-one wraps – focused almost entirely on the style of Clinton’s performance rather than the substance of her testimony. And it must be said: She was impressive. Clinton was unflappable even as some Republicans on the panel took gratuitous shots at her, spun personal theories about her motives, and even questioned whether she cared about the fate of the survivors of those attacks. But she was “impressive” only if the words that passed her lips were immaterial to evaluating her overall presentation.

Clinton misled the committee on topics big and small, on issues crucial to the inquiry and irrelevant to it. 

*She called the Accountability Review Board “nonpartisan” and “independent.” It was neither. Clinton hand-picked the co-chairmen. They never interviewed her and never saw her emails. They provided a draft copy of the final report to Clinton’s chief of staff for editing and tipped off the State Department about potentially problematic witnesses. 

*Clinton downplayed her role in Libya policymaking, suggesting she was just a bit player in Obama’s decision to intervene. But an email from Jake Sullivan, a senior Clinton adviser, laid out her “leadership on Libya.” 

*Clinton once again claimed that emails to her from Sidney Blumenthal were “unsolicited.” Asked to define “unsolicited,” Clinton explained: “It means I did not ask him to send” the emails. But her responses repeatedly show her soliciting more information from Blumenthal. In a July 7, 2012, email to Blumenthal, she writes: “...and thanks for keeping this stuff coming.” 

*Clinton said of Blumenthal’s commercial pursuits in Libya: “I did not know anything of his business interests.” But Blumenthal laid out those interests in an email to Clinton previewing an upcoming meeting she was to have. Clinton’s response to that email indicates that she was not only aware of his business interests, she was eager to help further them. She wrote: “Anything else to convey?”

*Clinton testified that Blumenthal was neither an “official or unofficial” adviser and said he “wasn’t advising me.” But Clinton testified Thursday that she found Blumenthal’s information “useful.” She regularly sent Blumenthal’s information on to others in the Obama administration, often with instructions to follow up on those emails. Blumenthal’s thoughts were included in Clinton’s public remarks and her private correspondence. Top Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan wrote to Clinton: “The speechwriting crew is taking Sid’s points below and massaging them into a set of remarks.”

*Clinton claims that there was no classified information at U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi. And she downplays suggestions that there was “sensitive” information there either. It depends how you define “sensitive,” she said. But the Washington Post reported: "More than three weeks after attacks in this city killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, sensitive documents remained only loosely secured in the remains of the U.S. mission."

*Gowdy asked Clinton whether the Accountability Review Board had access to her emails. The correct answer is the obvious one: “No.” But when Gowdy asked Clinton, she disingenously left open the possibility that they had.

*Clinton claimed her emails about Libya with Blumenthal were not work-related. But emails show that Blumethal’s emails a offered policy advice on Libya and often shared them with senior State Department officials. The question isn’t whether those emails were “work-related” – they surely were. The question is what other work-related emails Clinton kept private with the claim that they were merely “personal.” 

As the hearings wore on, Charles Woods took a philosophical, generous and somewhat bemused attitude towards Clinton.

“Who said it, Mark Twain?” he asked. 

“‘If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.’”

Today's Tune: Adele - Hello

DOJ lets Lois Lerner off the hook

By WASHINGTON EXAMINER • 10/24/15 12:01 AM

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/

"After stating that their investigation confirms that Tea Party and conservative groups were improperly targeted," Issa noted, "they dismiss it merely as a byproduct of gross mismanagement and incompetence -- ignoring volumes of evidence in the public record and efforts to obstruct legitimate inquiries." (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

If it's Friday it must be time for the Obama administration to announce a shabby decision to news media keen to turn their attention away from government affairs and toward football and other rewards of a relaxing weekend.

The Justice Department announced this Friday that it will not pursue charges against former IRS manager Lois Lerner or any other IRS official for targeting conservatives who applied to set up small non-profit groups.

In doing so, the department demonstrates its determination to make whistleblowers suffer even as bureaucratic malefactors go unpunished. Former House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa summed up the department's findings in his brief statement. "After stating that their investigation confirms that Tea Party and conservative groups were improperly targeted," he noted, "they dismiss it merely as a byproduct of gross mismanagement and incompetence — ignoring volumes of evidence in the public record and efforts to obstruct legitimate inquiries."

Indeed, the Justice Department's letter to Congress states that its probe of the IRS found "substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints. But poor management is not a crime."

First of all, it's more than a "belief" that the IRS targeted conservative and Tea Party non-profit applicants. In 2013, before she had invoked her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, Lerner publicly admitted to the targeting. She did so because she knew that an inspector general's report would soon reveal it, and she hoped to lessen its fallout.

That targeting occurred has never been the subject of any serious controversy. IRS officials deliberately dragged out non-profit applications from small Tea Party-related groups for years and placed illegal and unreasonable demands on them, obstructing them from exercising their rights under the law. From the very beginning, the only question was who had been responsible for this.

The assertion that "poor management is not a crime" is true. In government, poor management is not even a firing offense. But "poor judgment" often results in actual criminal activity, or at least gross workplace misconduct that should result in firing and the loss of pension. Not a single IRS official has been held to account for the misconduct that caused this scandal.

The decision to let Lerner off the hook is truly outrageous. Government officials who abuse their power should always be first in line for prosecution. Lerner surely expected as much when she invoked the Fifth Amendment in order to avoid testifying before Congress.

In a previous role at the Federal Election Commission, Lerner had used the power and resources of that agency to target conservatives as well. In the late 1990s, she revived an already-closed FEC case against a conservative candidate who refused the offer she made him over the phone — "Just promise us you will not run for public office again and we'll drop it." Lerner lost that case in court, but only after successfully harassing an innocent citizen with a meritless complaint.

The existing electronic record of Lerner's activities at the IRS, the part that the bureaucrats did not destroy in contravention of a court order, shows how she worked deliberately to avoid leaving a paper trail at work. In her own emails, she warned colleagues that anything IRS employees put in writing could be found through Freedom of Information requests. She also established through inquiries to her agency's computer staff that conversations over the bureau's instant message system would not be saved for posterity. That suggests intent, not just "poor management."

Lerner's division systematically harassed small and inconsequential conservative groups by denying them equal treatment under the law. Why? Because they could. This is how bureaucratic bullies behave.

If they can get away with it, then the no rule of law is traduced.

Hillary’s Breathtaking Mendacity

She lied to the nation in 2012, and she’s lying again now. You don’t look surprised.

By Andrew C. McCarthy — October 24, 2015

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton listens to a question as she testifies before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, on Capitol Hill in Washington October 22, 2015.

"We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

Those words, depraved words, were spoken by then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton, with President Obama by her side, on September 14, 2012. This was at Joint Base Andrews, during the most sacred of rites: the return of the remains of Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, and Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, all slain in the line of duty in Benghazi.

And all slain, it must never be forgotten, by jihadists carrying out what Clinton, Obama, and high-ranking national-security officials throughout the United States government knew full well was a planned terrorist attack, not a “protest” run amok and incited by “an awful Internet video.”

That obvious fact is now explicit after Mrs. Clinton’s galling testimony on Thursday before the House select committee investigating the Benghazi massacre.

Not only had the siege occurred on the eleventh anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 atrocities. Not only was Obama informed in the first minutes that a terrorist attack was underway. Not only had terrorist attacks in Benghazi been threatened and executed for months. Not only were mortars deployed by trained jihadists. Not only had Gregory Hicks, the senior State Department official on the ground in Libya after Ambassador Stevens was killed, directly briefed then-secretary Clinton about the then-ongoing terrorist attack — the same Gregory Hicks who would later testify that the anti-Muslim Internet video was a “non-event” in Benghazi.

Besides all that, we now know that, while the siege ensued, Clinton emailed daughter Chelsea to explain that Americans had been killed in Benghazi by “an al Qaeda-like group.”

This was about an hour before Clinton and Obama consulted by phone, immediately after which the State Department published Clinton’s mendacious “blame the video” announcement:

Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.

Yes, Clinton and Obama knew it was a terrorist attack but tried to con the country into believing it was a spontaneous response to a video.

A State Department memo documents that on the very next day after her duplicitous public statement, Clinton informed Egypt’s prime minister: “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. . . . It was a planned attack — not a protest.”

That was just two days before Clinton, in cold-blooded disgrace, looked Charles Woods in the eye and said, “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.” That was at Andrews as they were receiving the body of Ty Woods, killed while saving American lives in the late hours of a terrorist siege during which his government made no effort to save American lives.

That was moments before Clinton blamed the “awful Internet video” for the massacre.

To repeat, Clinton and Obama knew it was a terrorist attack but tried to con the country, very much including the families of our dead, into believing our heroes had been killed by a spontaneous response to a video.

U.S. President Barack Obama (2nd L) and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (3rd R) hold their hands over their hearts during the Transfer of Remains Ceremony for the return of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Libyan embassy employees at Joint Base Andrews September 14. 2012 in Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. Stevens and the three other embassy employees were killed when the consulate in Libya was attacked September 11. (Photo by Molly Riley-Pool/Getty Images) 

The lies about “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with” were dictated by the bipartisan Beltway policy of Islamist empowerment that Obama and Clinton championed. 

Indeed, at the time it occurred, the terrorist attack was just the latest in a series of jihadist threats and strikes in Benghazi. The policy of strategically and materially supporting Islamists made such attacks inevitable.

But it was election season. Obama and Clinton needed camouflage for the catastrophic failure of their policy. Thus: Clinton’s fustian about “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

In point of fact, Clinton and Obama had everything to do with the anti-Islamic video trailer, Innocence of Muslims. Virtually no one would have known of it had they not tirelessly publicized it in the international media and in official American government statements that were studiously linked to the Benghazi massacre.

In reality, though, it was the video that had nothing to do with the rage and violence directed at Americans, first in Egypt, then Libya, then beyond.

The violence at the U.S. embassy in Cairo had been threatened for months by al-Qaeda operatives and was clearly planned to erupt on the eleventh anniversary of the terror network’s 9/11 atrocities. The jihadists had been empowered by both the overthrow of the Qaddafi regime in Libya, orchestrated by Obama and Clinton, and the Muslim Brotherhood takeover in Egypt, championed by Obama and Clinton.

In the weeks before September 11, 2012, al-Qaeda saber-rattled about a potential Tehran 1979–style attack on the U.S. embassy in Cairo — perhaps they’d burn it to the ground, perhaps they’d take hostages to trade for American concessions like release of the Blind Sheikh (imprisoned for terrorism convictions in the U.S.).

Administration officials knew there would be trouble on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11. They also knew that, if the trouble was perceived as the foreseeable fallout of their Islamist empowerment policy, it could mortally damage Obama’s 2012 reelection bid and Clinton’s 2016 election ambitions.

So the administration swung into action. The obscure video trailer had been condemned by a fiery mufti in Egypt. Word of it began to circulate, but almost no one had seen it. Though in some small circles it was added to the endless list of Islamist grievances against America, those grievances are ideologically driven — and Islamist ideology is incorrigibly anti-American, regardless of what pretexts are cited for acting on it.

So Clinton’s opportunistic underlings pounced, seeing the video as their chance to shape a fraudulent narrative. As Muslims — including al-Qaeda operatives — began menacing the Cairo embassy, the State Department put out a series of tweets, a transparent effort to spin the inevitable rioting as incited by the video, not enabled by the administration’s own promotion of Islamic supremacists.

The Benghazi siege began a few hours later.

In the aftermath, of course, the administration edited intelligence-community talking points in order to promote the video fraud and conceal the terrorist victory — even as Obama touted al-Qaeda’s purported demise in campaign speeches. Susan Rice, an Obama confidant and a top official in Clinton’s State Department, was dispatched to lie to the public on the Sunday shows. Obama and Clinton indignantly condemned the video in public-address announcements for Pakistani television, paid for by American tax dollars. Obama took to the podium at the United Nations to proclaim to the world that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

The administration then put the criminal-justice system in service of the fraud. Making good on Clinton’s deceitful vow, police raided the home of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the video’s producer — arresting him in the dead of night, as if he were a violent criminal, even though he had been cooperating with law enforcement.

Why was he cooperating with law enforcement? Far from a crime, the making of the video was constitutionally protected activity — the kind of activity the executive branch is duty-bound to protect. But Nakoula went to law enforcement because Obama and Clinton’s smear had put his life in danger.

They did that, willfully, because they needed a scapegoat: Nakoula could serve the dual purposes of deceiving Americans into linking Benghazi’s dead to the video while convincing Muslims of Obama and Clinton’s longstanding commitment to subordinate constitutional free-speech rights to sharia’s blasphemy standards. Nakoula, a small-time con man whose prior conviction made him susceptible to revocation of parole, was the perfect foil.

He spent nearly a year in prison while Obama celebrated his reelection, Clinton plotted her campaign to replace him, and the Democrat-media complex helped them bury Benghazi as “old news.”

Just as she looked Charles Wood in the eye three years ago, while his son’s remains and those of three other Americans killed by jihadists lay nearby, so did Hillary Clinton look America in the eye during Thursday’s testimony. Both times, she seemed earnest, composed and determined as only a pathological liar can in the execution of a high-stakes fraud.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

EDITORIAL: What Hillary Knew

RELATED: Benghazi Committee Bombshell: Clinton Knew ‘Attack Had Nothing to Do with the Film’

RELATED: Hillary’s Benghazi Testimony Made Clear Yet Again How Unapologetic a Liar She Is

RELATED: The Clintons’ Greatest Political Gift: Persuading Millions of Americans to Defend the Indefensible

Book Review: John Le Carre: The Biography by Adam Sisman

• 
  
• edward wilson 
• http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/
• 22 October 2015

Ultimatelty it's about love. In places, this is a very emotional book. John le Carré had an utterly heartbreaking childhood. When he was five, his mother – having endured enough of her husband's cheating both as a crook and a philanderer – left home. According to Adam Sisman, le Carré's emotional scars never healed: "Looking back at his childhood, he has written of the 'sixteen hugless years' that followed". As le Carré wrote in a letter to his brother: "We were frozen children, & will always remain so." Sisman says Le Carré's response "was to try and make everybody else love him."

While acknowledging "warm feelings" for his subject, Sisman also endeavours "to preserve the splinter of ice in [his] heart that every writer needs, according to Graham Greene". The splinter justifiably melts when Sisman recounts the childhood years, but freezes hard when le Carré goes to Oxford following his National Service as an officer in the Intelligence Corps. His service experience led to his being recruited by MI5 to spy on his fellow undergraduates. To do so, le Carré joined the "Socialist Club, which welcomed left-wingers of every hue, from pale pink to dark red". In later life, he expressed no regret for having done so: "Somebody has to clean the drains, and I found that I did do things that, although they were in some way morally repugnant, I felt at the time, and still feel, to have been necessary."

Le Carré's later novels and political views – expressed by joining anti-war demos to protest against Blair's invasion of Iraq – progress from what Robert McCrum describes as "seething" to "incandescent". The most startling revelation came in 2008 when le Carré admitted to Sunday Times journalist Rod Liddle that "while working for MI6 he had considered defecting to the Soviet Union". Le Carré later tried to explain his comment in a letter to The Times. It was a result of "post-prandial Calvados" and reflected "the plight of professional eavesdroppers who identify so closely with the people they are listening to that they start to share their lives". Or is there another explanation? "People who have had very unhappy childhoods", le Carré once wrote, "are pretty good at inventing themselves... I'm a liar. Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist."

There are a few writers of spy fiction, if any, who have more personal experience in the world of espionage than John le Carré. Following a brief spell as a modern languages master at Eton, le Carré joined MI5 – a service that he did not find impressive: "For a while you wondered whether the fools were really pretending to be fools, as some kind of deception, but alas, the reality was the mediocrity." He then made the upmarket jump to MI6. But few ex-colleagues in either service applauded le Carré's novels. One ranted: "I deplore and hate everything he has done and said against the intelligence services." At a diplomatic dinner in Washington he was confronted by another ex-colleague who shouted: "You bastard! You utter bastard."

This is the best biography of 2015 – a rare achievement that invites rereading.

Edward Wilson's latest novel is 'A Very British Ending' (Arcadia)

Bloomsbury, £25. Order at the discounted price of £22 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop

• More about: 
• John Le Carre
• Adam Sisman

She Knew All Along

The House hearing on Benghazi reveals that Hillary Clinton’s spin about the attack was a politically expedient fiction.

By 

KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

http://www.wsj.com/

October 22, 2015

Hillary Clinton at the House Benghazi committee hearing, Oct. 22. PHOTO: SAUL LOEB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Thanks to Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony on Thursday, we now understand why the former secretary of state never wanted anyone to see her emails and why the State Department sat on documents. Turns out those emails and papers show that the Obama administration deliberately misled the nation about the deadly events in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.

Don’t forget how we came to this point. Mrs. Clinton complained in her testimony on Capitol Hill that past Congresses had never made the overseas deaths of U.S. officials a “partisan” issue. That’s because those past deaths had never inspired an administration to concoct a wild excuse for their occurrence, in an apparent attempt to avoid blame for a terror attack in a presidential re-election year.

The early hints that this is exactly what happened after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans cast doubt on every White House-issued “fact” about the fiasco and led to the establishment of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s select committee.

What that House committee did Thursday was finally expose the initial deception. To understand the willful depth of that trickery, let’s briefly recall the history.

In early September 2012, at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Joe Biden summarized to thunderous applause the administration’s re-election pitch: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” Translation: The president had revived the economy, even as he had put “al Qaeda on the run,” as Mr. Obama put it. Five days later, four Americans in Benghazi were dead. It appeared the White House had slept through a terror attack on the anniversary of 9/11.

The administration instead immediately presented the attack as a spontaneous mob backlash to an anti-Muslim YouTube video. At 10:30 on the night of the attack, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement about the violence, blaming the video. She repeated the charge in a speech the next day. President Obama gave his own speech that day, referring to the video and refusing to use the word “terrorism.”

The next day, Mrs. Clinton mentioned the video twice more. The day after that, Press Secretary Jay Carney said: “We have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack.” Mrs. Clinton promised the father of one of the victims that the administration would “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” In his weekly address, Mr. Obama talked about the video. When the Libyan president said there was evidence the attack was planned months in advance, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice contradicted him. She instead told five Sunday talk shows—five days after the attack—that “based on the best information we have to date,” the attack “began spontaneously” in response to “this hateful video.” Mr. Obama for two full weeks continued to talk about YouTube.

Here’s what the Benghazi committee found in Thursday’s hearing. Two hours into Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan referred to an email Mrs. Clinton sent to her daughter, Chelsea, at 11:12 the night of the attack, or 45 minutes after the secretary of state had issued a statement blaming YouTube-inflamed mobs. Her email reads: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like group.” Mrs. Clinton doesn’t hedge in the email; no “it seems” or “it appears.” She tells her daughter that on the anniversary of 9/11 an al Qaeda group assassinated four Americans.

That same evening, Mrs. Clinton spoke on the phone with Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf, around 8 p.m. The notes from that conversation, in a State Department email, describe her as saying: “We have asked for the Libyan government to provide additional security to the compound immediately as there is a gun battle ongoing, which I understand Ansar as Sharia [sic] is claiming responsibility for.” Ansar al Sharia is al Qaeda’s affiliate on the Arabian Peninsula. So several hours into the attack, Mrs. Clinton already believed that al Qaeda was attacking U.S. facilities.

The next afternoon, Mrs. Clinton had a call with the Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil. The notes from it are absolutely damning. The secretary of state tells him: “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest.” And yet Mrs. Clinton, and Ms. Rice and Mr. Obama for days and days continued to spin the video lie.

In other news Thursday, Judicial Watch unveiled a new cable, sent the day after the attack, from the Defense Intelligence Agency to the State Department Command Center. It explains that the attack was carried out by a “Salafi terrorism group” in “retaliation for the killing of an Al Qaeda operative.”

The cable says “the attack was an organized operation with specific information that the U.S. Ambassador was present.” The cable included details about the group’s movements and the weapons it used in the assault.

Count on the Obama administration to again resort to blaming “confusing” and “conflicting” information at the time for its two-week spin. That was Mrs. Clinton’s flimsy excuse at the hearing. But her own conversations prove she was in no doubt about what happened—while it was still happening.

Democrats on the committee spent most of the hearing complaining that it was a waste of time and money. Quite the opposite. It was invaluable, for the clarity provided by those three emails alone.

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/she-knew-all-along-1445556778-lMyQjAxMTA1MzI1MzgyODMyWj

Write to kim@wsj.com.

Putin marches, Obama watches

By Charles Krauthammer

https://wwwashingtonpost.com/opinions/

October 22, 2015

Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) shakes hands with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, October 20, 2015. (Reuters)

Guess who just popped up in the Kremlin? Bashar al-Assad, Syrian dictator and destroyer, now Vladimir Putin’s newest pet. After four years holed up in Damascus, Assad was summoned to Russia to bend a knee to Putin, show the world that today Middle East questions get settled not in Washington but in Moscow, and officially bless the Russian-led four-nation takeover of Syria now underway.

Does the bewildered Obama administration finally understand what Russia is up to?

President Obama says Russia is doomed to fail in the Syrian quagmire. But Russia is not trying to reconquer the country for Assad. It is consolidating a rump Syrian state in the roughly 20 percent of the country he now controls, the Alawite areas stretching north and west from Damascus through Latakia and encompassing the Russian naval base at Tartus.

It’s a partition. It will leave the Islamic State in control in the interior north and east. Why is this doomed to failure?

Putin’s larger strategy is also obvious. He is not reconstructing the old Soviet empire. That’s too large a task. But he is rebuilding and reasserting Russia’s ability to project power beyond its borders. Annexing Crimea restores to the motherland full control of the warm-water Black Sea port that Russia has coveted since Peter the Great. Shoring up a rump Alawite state secures Russia’s naval and air bases in the eastern Mediterranean. Add to that Russia’s launching of advanced cruise missiles from warships in the Caspian Sea to strike Syrian rebels 900 miles away and you have the most impressive display of Russian military reach since the Cold War.

For Obama, of course, these things don’t matter. “In today’s world,” he told the U.N. last month, “the measure of strength is no longer defined by the control of territory.” That he clearly believes this fantasy was demonstrated by his total abandonment of Iraq, forfeiting U.S. bases from which we could have projected power in the region (most notably preventing, through control of Iraqi airspace, the Iranian rearming and reinforcement of Assad’s weakening regime).

While Obama counts on the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, Putin acts. As soon as the ink was dry on the Iran nuclear deal, Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani flew to Moscow (a sanctions violation that we blithely ignored) to plan the multinational Syria campaign he is now directing. His Shiite expeditionary force is comprised of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iraqi Shiite militias and Lebanese Hezbollah fighting under the cover of Russian airpower.

They are pounding non-Islamic State rebels, many equipped, trained and allegedly supported by the U.S. and Obama’s vaunted 60-nation coalition. What a comfort to be pulverized by 60 to 90 Russian airstrikes each day but to know that Belgium is with you.

The immediate Russian objective is to retake Aleppo, the eastern part of which is the rebels’ last remaining urban stronghold.

Russia is not fighting the Islamic State. On the contrary. Its attacks on the anti-government, anti-Islamic State rebels have allowed the Islamic State to expand, capturing rebel-held villages north of Aleppo, even as the Shiite expeditionary force approaches from the south.

Apart from the wreckage to Obama’s dreams of a “reset” with Russia, think of how these advances mock Obama’s dreams for Iran, namely that the nuclear deal would moderate Iranian behavior.

What has happened since the signing of the deal in July? Iran convicts an American journalist , contemptuously refusing to offer even the most minimal humanitarian gesture. Iran brazenly tests a nuclear-capable ballistic missile that our own U.N. ambassador said violates Security Council resolutions. And now Iran’s most notorious Revolutionary Guard commander takes control of a pan-Shiite army trying to decimate our remaining allies in the Syrian civil war.

Obama’s response to all this? Nothing. He has washed his hands of the region, still the center of world oil production and trade, and still the world’s most volatile region, seething with virulent jihadism ready for export. When you call something a quagmire you have told the world that you’re out and staying out. Russia and Iran will have their way.

“60 Minutes” asked Obama: Are you concerned about yielding leadership to Russia? Obama responded dismissively: Propping up a weak ally is not leadership. I’m leading the world on climate change.

Upon hearing that, anyone in any conflict anywhere who has put his trust in the United States should start packing his bags for Germany.

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter orsubscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more:

David Ignatius: The U.S. cannot pass Syria on to Putin

Charles Krauthammer: Obama’s Syria debacle

David Ignatius: Team Russia: World Police

Charles Krauthammer: Putin’s gambit, Obama’s puzzlement

The Post’s View: Don’t greenlight Mr. Putin’s Syria project