Krauthammer “Not Buying” DNI seventh day duplicity…..”Amnesia” arrived too quickly

Krauthammer “Not Buying” That DNI Clapper Changed Benghazi Talking Points

video from realclearpolitics:

Krauthammer pointed out that a week ago, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), said that in closed-door testimony Clapper stated that he had no idea who changed the talking points.

“Now a week later he seems to discover that he did? That’s kind of strange. I’ve seen amnesia in my day … and (one week) is pretty quick,” Krauthammer said.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/11/21/krauthammer_not_buying_that_dni_clapper_changed_benghazi_talking_points.html

What a Tangled Web We Weave, When We First Practice to Deceive!

Barack Obama is without question unaware of such Western Culture adages…… the ones I learned from  my Mother since I can remember.    She didn’t attend Harvard or Columbia at any level.    After graduating eighth grade at parochial school, she went off to work  as a cashier at Friedman’s Super Market, downtown St. Paul at the age of 13. 

She was even  born and raised an American in an immigrant culture.   Marxism was out of favor back then.

“Handsome is as handsome does” judges Barack Hussein Obama a very ugly individual.   But, then, he is the first nonAmerican president ever to occupy the Oval Office.    His lack of grace and understandings of the American Way is simply another void in this former Muslim’s, Islamophile  habits.

“There is neither good nor bad.   Only thinking makes it so.”   The arrogance of B. H. Obama distorts any reception of the classic good.   He at least hasn’t murdered anyone yet…..And,  then there is the Benghazi episode.

 

Oh What a Tangled Web What did Obama know and when did he know it? By Victor Davis Hanson      at National Review Online

        Supporters of President Obama have dubbed those who question administration statements about Libya as either partisans or conspiracy theorists, on the premise that the administration had no reason to dissimulate. But in fact, it had plenty of political reasons not to be candid, as the following questions make clear.

Why was the administration hesitant to beef up security at the vulnerable Benghazi consulate ahead of time, or to send in military assistance during the seven-hour attack on the consulate and the CIA annex, or at least to be candid after the attack?

The Obama reelection campaign had established a catchy narrative about foreign policy. “Leading from behind” had rid the world of Qaddafi without the loss of American lives, and had prepped Libya for the arrival of the Arab Spring, which would lead to a postbellum reform government. Barack Obama had killed Osama bin Laden and scattered al-Qaeda, dispelling slurs that he was somehow soft on Islamic terrorism. His reset diplomacy had brought a cool professional approach of quiet competency to foreign policy, consistent with a new lower-profile American posture abroad.

The idea of a preplanned hit by al-Qaeda affiliates on a vulnerable and unprepared American diplomatic post had the potential to shatter that narrative right before the election. Susan Rice summed up best the administration’s positive take on the supposedly spontaneous riot: 

This is a turbulent time. It’s a time of dramatic change. It’s a change that the United States has backed because we understand that when democracy takes root, when human rights and people’s freedom of expression can be manifested, it may lead to turbulence in the short term, but over the long term, that is in the interest of the United States. The mobs we’ve seen on the outside of these embassies are a small minority. They’re the ones who have largely lost in these emerging democratic processes, and just as the people of these countries are not going to allow their lives to be hijacked by a dictator, they’re not going to allow an extremist mob to hijack their future and their freedom. And we’re going to continue to stand with the vast majority of the populations in these countries.

Had we, as our people on the ground had requested, beefed up security at the annex with Marines, attention at some point might have been focused on the chaotic situation in Libya and the vulnerability of the very Americans who supposedly had done so much to free Libyans from Qaddafi. Ambassador Chris Stevens was the sort of new diplomat — low-key, cool, a career professional, fluent in the local language and customs, able to blend in with the locals — that typified the new soft-power approach. He was hardly the sort of ambassador who would need, or want to be associated with, a sandbagged, barbed-wired, Marine-laden traditional compound.

Likewise, sending in air support to the beleaguered defenders — in the manner that Bill Clinton allowed the Blackhawks to strafe whatever was necessary to save a trapped American outpost in Mogadishu — would have reminded Americans that once more we were fighting al-Qaeda or its affiliates — all very much alive after the death of bin Laden. It would also have had the potential to result in a nasty high-profile firefight in a supposedly friendly reforming country on the eve of the U.S. election — a sort of mini-version of Mogadishu or the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon. This was at the very time the president on the campaign trail was telling the country that we were leaving wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not starting one in Libya.

Second, the alternative explanation — blaming a crass right-wing anti-Islamic filmmaker and the notoriously Islamophobic Florida pastor Terry Jones — was just too attractive an antithesis between a few bigoted Neanderthals and the majority of reform-minded liberal Americans. Blasting reckless hate speech, arresting the filmmaker for his insensitivity on the pretext of a minor parole violation, and delivering Cairo-speech-like reassurances about ruffled Muslim feelings would all showcase the president’s natural forte on the global stage: ecumenical reaching out, zero tolerance for bigotry, and singular sensitivity to wounded Muslim feelings.

Obama simply could not resist that, even though on September 12, the day after the attack, he let slip in an interview with 60 Minutes (of which this segment was not aired till weeks later) that he suspected it might have been a preplanned terrorist hit. After all, the notion that on 9/11 hundreds of people would show up at an obscure American consulate in a secondary Libyan city in order to protest a two-month-old video produced by an obscure American, and then suddenly get out of hand and use heavy weaponry such as machine guns and mortars to attack Americans, was as preposterous as it was apparently still preferable to the inconvenient truth.

Why did we even have a consulate — or a CIA annex — in Benghazi in the first place? Who really knows? Most nations and non-governmental organizations had long ago pulled their personnel out of their main stations in Tripoli, let alone Benghazi. But the truth again probably will be inconvenient to a president who ran in 2008 on a new transparency in foreign policy, an end to the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, a suspicion of past CIA behaviors both abroad and at Guantanamo, and a blanket dislike of private “contractors,” veritable merchants of death who profit from the mayhem of war. Given the administration’s desire to help the opposition to Bashar Assad in Syria, given our newfound compatibility with Turkey, now an archenemy of a once “no problems” and “reformist” Syria, and given the vast and mostly unaccounted-for Qaddafi weapons arsenal, it might seem logical to have a program that would “secure” these dangerous weapons. And why not at the same time repackage them, through hired non-governmental contractors, as anonymous donations to the Syrian opposition — perhaps with the help of Turkish transit?

But such a policy, if disclosed, was fraught with danger in general and for the reformist Obama in particular. With a Nobel Peace Prize laureate as president, Americans now do not use consulates in obscure places as fronts for CIA arms-smuggling operations. We do not send weapons covertly to groups whose actual affiliations and ideologies we are not yet certain are legitimate or in U.S. interests. We do not employ Blackwater-like private mercenaries under cover to offer plausible deniability. We do not use our ambassadors to facilitate covert arms transfers and smuggling. And we certainly do not expose U.S. personnel to unacceptable risks abroad for the sake of non-transparent objectives of both dubious utility and questionable morality. 

How is the Benghazi matter connected to David Petraeus and the question of female fraternization with top officers and officials?

In many ways. First, pre-election, the U.S media had decided that Libya was taboo. Those who dissented were immediately blasted as politicizing a national tragedy or, in Romney’s case, using national disaster as a cheap campaign ploy. The prurient sexual matter inadvertently directed media attention to the CIA director — who also happens to be the most renowned American soldier since Matthew Ridgway — and by extension to Benghazi. The administration’s narrative about the Petraeus resignation, like its Benghazi narrative, simply asks the American people to believe something that they cannot suppose to be true.

Most do accept the FBI Keystone Cops story that Jill Kelley’s worry over anonymous angry e-mails prompted her call to a friendly agent, who set in motion a full-scale FBI investigation, which, in turn, discovered secret e-mails between Petraeus and biographer Paula Broadwell, which, in a further turn, made it clear, inter alia, that the two were having a romantic affair.

Sometime in late summer, the FBI passed on to Justice Department officials its discovery of the Petraeus affair, suggesting, among other things, that Broadwell was in possession of, or at least knew about, classified information. We are supposed to believe that the Justice Department noted that information, but when it finally passed it on to Attorney General Holder in late summer, he chose not to tell the president of the findings. Indeed, Obama supposedly did not learn about Petraeus until the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, asked Petraeus to resign three days after the election, on a Friday afternoon, the usual time for press releases concerning inconvenient developments.

More important, Petraeus himself had supposedly gone on record shortly after the 9/11 attacks as saying that the violence grew out of a spontaneous demonstration gone awry, rather than being a preplanned terrorist hit using mortars and machine guns. If Petraeus did say that, it was somewhat surprising — given that his own CIA personnel on the ground in Libya had informed him otherwise. Petraeus’s purported initial analysis likewise was not supported by live-feed videos that showed gunmen, not demonstrators, attacking Americans, and it was also at odds with the monitoring of jihadist websites that were already boasting of a successful hit on Americans — but it was entirely consistent with what administration officials like Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, James Clapper, and Barack Obama were insisting upon.

So the natural question arises: Why would David Petraeus, the seasoned veteran who had fought insurgency and terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, offer a blurred analysis that differed from what his common sense, reports from his own subordinates, live video feeds, and jihadist braggadocio all seemed to confirm? More curious still, after his resignation, Petraeus testified to a congressional committee that he had in fact confirmed a terrorist attack all along, only to see his agency’s accurate preliminary analysis modified by others — in the sense of sanitized White House talking points that made no mention of a preplanned al-Qaeda attack. That is quite a tangled web, when the U.S. government can neither protect its personnel nor explain why it cannot.

And another question arises: If, for much of the summer and early autumn, the FBI, and perhaps even the Justice Department and the White House, had the explosive knowledge about Petraeus’s private life, why was that apparently not a matter of particular concern? Did it become so only when his intelligence analyses could no longer be synchronized with pre-election talking points, and when rumors about his personal life started to spread outside the administration?So why did Petraeus resign, and why right after the election?No one but Petraeus knows — and in about two weeks probably no one will care. He may have felt that some in the White House were massaging his analyses, perhaps emboldened by knowledge of his private affairs, and he may therefore have thought that his tenure at the CIA was fatally compromised, leading him to resign, but only after the election, in a manner that should not appear political. Or, then again and more ominously, the White House may have felt that after the election, Petraeus’s personal problems, and possible intelligence dissents, had become liabilities and thus he should be forced to resign. We still do not know whether Petraeus willingly resigned in order to ensure that his analyses could not be tainted by political massaging, or whether he desperately wished to stay at the CIA, but was booted out as soon as Barack Obama was safely reelected, when any subsequent testimony that might contradict what was earlier released would fortunately only muddy the waters.Where does all this lead?I think nowhere. Unlike in the cases of Watergate and Iran-Contra, there is no investigative press, given the media’s worry about endangering the second-term agenda of a progressive president. There is no special prosecutor salivating after a government official, as there was with Scooter Libby. “The fog of war” and accusations of “Conspiracy theory!” should be enough to bury the scandal and discredit those who seek the truth. Modifying a CIA analysis for political purposes is probably no crime. Quid pro quos are simply the polite, everyday — and legal — Washington version of blackmail. In the end, the only casualties in this sordid tale were the sterling career of David Petraeus — and four murdered Americans whose deaths were preventable.”

 

Obamatalk, Never to be Trusted, Reverses Israeli Love now that Election is Over

 

by Paul Mirengoff in Israel, Middle East, Obama Foreign Policy     at PowerLine:

That didn’t take long —

Obama reverses himself on Israel

We gave Obama credit for his initial reaction to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, namely that Israel “has the right to defend itself” against attack and that the Israelis will make their own decisions about their “military tactics and operations.” We recognized, however, that Obama would likely back away from this line if the conflict dragged on for an extended period of time.

As it turned out, Obama reversed himself almost immediately. The Washington Post says as much in this report called “With Hillary Clinton’s dash to Middle East, Obama signals a shift in his approach.”

Stating the obvious, the Post observes:

Clinton’s peacemaking trip is Obama’s clearest signal yet to Israel that it should begin to pull back its campaign against militants in the Gaza Strip. The administration knows that with Clinton on the ground trying to resolve the crisis, it will be harder for Netanyahu to make good on his threat to invade Gaza.

Obama’s real position, then, is that he will attempt to dictate the tactics and operations through which Israel exercises the right to defend itself. And Obama’s efforts to dictate constitute a constraint on Israel’s right to defend itself.

But if, due to American constaints, things go badly for Israel, Obama can always have Candy Crowley read his original expansive but meaningless statement of support.

How Much of America Will Foreigner Obama ‘Donate’ to the U.N.?

Will Republicans have the guts to nix Obama’s desire to belittle America to the U.N.?

MISSION QATAR EXTRA!!

by  Craig Rucker:

UN climate boss:

This is a centralized transformation that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different.
Are you ready to have a Central American UN bureaucrat oversee a “centralized transformation” of the economy?

The Guardian published an interview Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, did with Yale Environment 360. In the interview, Figueres, whose father and brother both served as President of Costa Rica, vows to achieve a new commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol in Qatar, aims to bring the United States into a binding climate treaty and was exceptionally candid about the UN’s goal to bring all world economies under UN central management.

Figueres told Yale that climate change will cause world economies to undergo the:

biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science. So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different.

This represents a tremendous expansion of UN power over the United States’ and the rest of the world’s economies.

CFACT is on alert!

Figuere’s confidence that she can bring the United States into a full climate treaty by 2015 and the EU, Australia and much of the rest of the world into a new Kyoto commitment period before she leaves Qatar December 7th, indicate that she is likely receiving back room assurances that the negotiations are breaking through and moving fast.

How many new restrictions are set to be imposed and how many taxpayer dollars are about to be wasted in Qatar in the name of global warming?

Will Obama sign on the global warming dotted line?
CFACT takes on UN climate
summit in Qatar
 

COP 18, the UN conference on climate change, begins in just days and CFACT is taking it on!

CFACT is headed to the Arabian Peninsula, to Doha, Qatar, where the Obama administration is set to begin its first major UN climate negotiation since reelection.

Remember when Obama told Russian President Medvedev, “this is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility”? We fear he told climate campaigners the exact same thing.

This is dangerous.

After a campaign of near complete climate silence, America’s newly elected President vowed on election night that he wants “our children to live in an America that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” President Obama’s reelection, leaving him free from ever facing the voters again, has breathed new life into the global warming movement.

Climate campaigners, researchers and those seeking to cash in on billions in climate tax dollars and carbon trading schemes have been trying desperately to jump start talks on a successor to the expiring Kyoto protocol since the failure of COP 15 in Copenhagen. Will their worst wishes come true at last?

Will President Obama listen to Al Gore and position the United States solidly behind a new UN climate treaty?

The economies of the world are still reeling.

Locking billions, indeed trillions of dollars into global warming policies which will have no meaningful effect on the climate is economic suicide.

Yet this is the Obama administration which famously told us “you never let a serious crisis go to waste.” For them a crisis is for exploiting, not solving.

The Kyoto protocol expires in just over a month leaving all sorts of climate schemes in the lurch. 

There’s HUGE money at stake. 

Carbon traders have lined up to sock away billions in bonuses and commissions for trading in a phony market. The European carbon trading system is on the verge of collapse, leaving would-be carbon traders and bureaucrats scrambling to guarantee funding. They will not give up their dreams of wealth without a fight. Neither will those cashing in on alternative energy scams, research grants and handouts to the dictators of the developing world. 

In addition, the $30 billion pledge of aid to the developing world made in Copenhagen three years ago also expires in 2012. This was a major topic at the just concluded preliminary talks in Bangkok. Renewing and expanding what the UN calls “climate finance” will be front and center in Doha. This poses a three-fold threat, these large sums serve to buy the support of developing nations, the funds make the developing nations and their elites dependent and of course the funds are a wasteful drain on the taxpayers of the developed world.
The UN is taking no chances. It is simultaneously working towards a new international treaty, while hedging its bets through achieving many of its principle (and most destructive) goals through side agreements, massive funding and national policy making.

The one thing we have going for us is the likely inability of a climate treaty to achieve ratification in the Senate — but will this constrain Obama? The answer seems a clear NO.

President Obama’s EPA already has crippling regulations lined up and ready to go to give the UN’s climate campaigners by administrative fiat what they could not achieve through the open legislative process. The main threat is that Obama will cut side deals and agreements in Qatar and then bypass Congress and its vexing checks, balances and democratic process.

Is there any limit to this President’s renewed hubris?

Would he, could he dare to use this Qatar conference to set the stage to bind the United States to full blown UN climate treaty and then use brinksmanship to push it through this Senate or the next?

A world in the grips of the fiercest economic crisis since the 1930s can not afford it. We must not permit Qatar to be the wellspring of new treaties, agreements, taxes, carbon markets or redistribution. Recovery for the United States and the world depends on stopping these bureaucrats and profiteers cold.

CFACT is the team to debunk the propaganda in Doha and hold the line.

CFACT is the preeminent organization directly engaging UN delegates with alternative viewpoints which challenge the prevailing climate orthodoxy. CFACT is a fully accredited Nongovernmental Organization with standing to attend sessions, host UN sanctioned events and displays and communicate directly with delegates through official channels. Delegates routinely thank CFACT’s staff and have told them that if they did not get their information from CFACT they would have no access to skeptical viewpoints.

CFACT’s delegation to Qatar will again feature Lord Christopher Monckton who masters the intricacies of climate policy, skewers hypocrisy and exposes the dangers in terms that compel attention as few others can.

If you are one of the many who has followed CFACT’s work through the years, you know to count on us to provide you the inside information on what’s really going on in these negotiations. We will once again watch, report, educate and take action.

Follow every development as it happens on our Qatar action page, share, email, write your paper, join us in the fight.

This time the UN meets in Arabia. The peril is renewed. There is important work to do. We’re ready. Join us.

For nature and people too,

Dennis Prager: The Troubles Obama’s New York Times Has with Evil

How the New York Times Covers Evil

by Dennis Prager    at   dennisprager.com:

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The way in which the New York Times reports good vs. evil is one of the most important stories of our time.

Take the war between Israel and Hamas that is taking place right now.

This war is as morally clear as wars get. Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to annihilating the Jewish state. It runs a theocratic totalitarian state in Gaza, with no individual liberty and no freedom of speech or press. In a nutshell, Hamas is a violent, fascist organization.

Israel, meanwhile, is one the world’s most humane states, not to mention a democracy that is so tolerant that Arab members of its parliament are free to express admiration for Hamas.

Over the past decade, Hamas had launched thousands of rockets into Israel with one aim: to kill and maim as many Israeli citizens as possible — Israelis at work, at play, asleep in their homes, in their cars. Finally, Israel responded by killing Ahmed al-Jabari, the chief organizer of Hamas violence, the Hamas “military commander” as he was known among Palestinians.

The next day, three more Israelis were killed by rockets.

Then Hamas targeted Tel Aviv, Israel’s most densely populated region, and Israel shelled Hamas rocket launching sites.

In other words, an evil entity made war on a peaceful, decent entity, and the latter responded.

How has the New York Times reported this?

On Friday, on its front page, the Times featured two three-column wide photos. The top one was of Gaza Muslim mourners alongside the dead body of al-Jabari. The photo below was of Israeli Jews mourning alongside the dead body of Mira Scharf, a 27-year-old mother of three.

What possible reason could there be for the New York Times to give identical space to these two pictures? One of the dead, after all, was a murderer, and the other was one of his victims.

The most plausible reason is that the Times wanted to depict through pictures a sort of moral equivalence: Look, sophisticated Times readers, virtually identical scenes of death and mourning on both sides of the conflict. How tragic.

If one had no idea what had triggered this war, one would read and see the Times coverage and conclude that two sides killing each other were both equally at fault.

This is the mainstream (i.e., liberal) media’s approach. The Los Angeles Times headline on the same day was: “Israel and Gaza veering down familiar, bitter path,”

Same presentation: two scorpions fighting in a bottle.

Examples are endless. Here is one more:

In 2002, there was widespread Nigerian Muslim opposition to the Miss World pageant scheduled to take place that year in Nigeria. Defending the pageant, a Nigerian female reporter wrote a column in which she said that not only were the contestants not “whores,” as alleged by the Muslim protestors, but they were such fine women that “Muhammad would probably have taken one of the contestants for a wife.”

That one sentence led to Muslim rioting, the beating and killing of Christians, the burning of churches and the razing of her newspaper’s offices.

How did the New York Times report the events?

“Fiery Zealotry Leaves Nigeria in Ashes Again.”

No group is identified as responsible. “Fiery zealotry,” not Muslim violence, was responsible.

The article then begins: “The beauty queens are gone now, chased from Nigeria by the chaos in Kaduna.”

Again, Muslim rioters weren’t responsible for chasing the beauty queens out of Nigeria; it was “chaos.”

The article concludes that what happened in Kaduna was another example of Africa’s “difficulty in reconciling people who worship separately.” In other words, Christians and Muslims were equally guilty.

As the flagship news source of the left, the New York Times reveals the great moral failing inherent to leftism — its combination of moral relativism and the division of the world between strong and weak, Western and non-Western, and rich and poor, rather than between good and evil.

Is CBS Returning to Professional Journalism? Reports DNI Snipped Reference to Al Qaeda

Sources: Office of the DNI cut “al Qaeda”

reference from Benghazi talking points,

and CIA, FBI signed off

 (CBS News) WASHINGTON – CBS News has learned that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) cut specific references to “al Qaeda” and “terrorism” from the unclassified talking points given to Ambassador Susan Rice on the Benghazi consulate attack – with the agreement of the CIA and FBI. The White House or State Department did not make those changes.

There has been considerable discussion about who made the changes to the talking points that Rice stuck to in her television appearances on Sept. 16 (video), five days after the attack that killed American Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, and three other U.S. nationals.

Republicans have accused her of making misleading statements by referring to the assault as a “spontaneous” demonstration by extremists. Some have suggested she used the terminology she did for political reasons.

House Republicans “deeply troubled” by Rice
Congress to investigate CIA talking points on Benghazi
Watch: McCain says Rice still has explaining to do

However, an intelligence source tells CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan the links to al Qaeda were deemed too “tenuous” to make public, because there was not strong confidence in the person providing the intelligence. CIA Director David Petraeus, however, told Congress he agreed to release the information — the reference to al Qaeda — in an early draft of the talking points, which were also distributed to select lawmakers.

“The intelligence community assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.” DNI spokesman Shawn Turner tells CBS News. That information was shared at a classified level — which Rice, as a member of President Obama’s cabinet, would have been privy to.

An intelligence source says the talking points were passed from the CIA to the DNI, where the substantive edits were made, and then to FBI, which made more edits as part of “standard procedure.”

Timeline: How Benghazi attack, probe unfolded

The head of the DNI is James Clapper, an Obama appointee. He ultimately did review the points, before they were given to Ambassador Rice and members of the House intelligence committee on Sept. 14. They were compiled the day before.

Brennan says her source wouldn’t confirm who in the agency suggested the final edits which were signed off on by all intelligence agencies.

Another source, a senior U.S. official familiar with the drafting of the talking points, tells CBS News the “controversy this word choice has caused came as a surprise.”

“The points were not, as has been insinuated by some, edited to minimize the role of extremists, diminish terrorist affiliations, or play down that this was an attack,” the official tells CBS News, adding that there were “legitimate intelligence and legal issues to consider, as is almost always the case when explaining classified assessments publicly.”

“Most people understand that saying ‘extremists’ were involved in a direct assault on the mission isn’t shying away from the idea of terrorist involvement,” added the official. “Because of the various elements involved in the attack, the term extremist was meant to capture the range of participants.”

A spokeswoman for House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers suggested today that the DNI’s explanation is different that what the committee was told behind closed doors last week.

“The statement released Monday evening by the DNI’s spokesman regarding how the Intelligence Community’s talking points were changed gives a new explanation that differs significantly from information provided in testimony to the Committee last week,” House Intelligence Committee spokeswoman Susan Phalen told CBS News. “Chairman Rogers looks forward to discussing this new explanation with Director Clapper as soon as possible to understand how the DNI reached this conclusion and why leaders of the Intelligence Community testified late last week that they were unaware of who changed the talking points.”

Several militant groups have been eyed as likely culprits, including the Islamic extremist militia Ansar al Sharia, which was based in Eastern Libya and enjoyed huge power in Benghazi before the attack. Gen. Carter Ham, chief of the U.S. Africa Command, said recently that there were “linkages” between al Qaeda and some of the people who attacked the consulate and the CIA annex about a mile away.

CBS News senior correspondent John Miller, himself a former Deputy Director of the DNI’s analysis division, explained on “CBS This Morning” in the weeks after the Benghazi attack why it has been so difficult for American intelligence agents to clearly identify and label the suspects in the assault. (Click player at left for Miller’s full analysis 

“We want a wiring diagram,” Miller said. “We want an organized picture: ‘It was al Qaeda who ordered it, it was Ansar al Sharia who carried it out, it was this group that assisted. The problem is, the lines have blurred between those groups and their members. Ansar al Sharias are popping up in places like Benghazi, but also in Yemen, also in Tunisia, in all these countries — and they’re not al Qaeda, but they are reading from the al Qaeda narrative and they are being influenced by people who are formerly influential extremists in al Qaeda.”

“The actual truth is, the picture isn’t that clear, but we can piece it together, and that’s not satisfying to people who are used to saying, ‘You can attach this attack to that group,'” said Miller.

for videos accompanying article please click here:   http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57552328/sources-dni-cut-al-qaeda-reference-from-benghazi-talking-points-cia-fbi-signed-off/

Court Will Not Yet Dictate to Bible Publisher Obamacare Contraceptive Demands

Court Rules in Favor of Bible Publisher

by Bethany Monk

A federal court today ruled that a Bible publisher does not have to offer contraceptives and possible abortion-inducing drugs to employees, for the time being. 

Tyndale House Publishers, a nonprofit that publishes Bibles and other Christian materials, is seeking relief from a rule issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which says almost all businesses and religious groups must offer insurance the covers those items, or face hefty fines. The court said the mandate may not be enforced against Tyndale while the case proceeds — making it the third company nationwide to get a short reprieve.

“The court has done the right thing in halting the mandate while our lawsuit moves forward,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Legal Counsel Matt Bowman. “The judge is going to do final decision making later, but (the preliminary injunction) will protect Tyndale for the foreseeable future. 

There are currently 40 lawsuits with more than 110 plaintiffs challenging the mandate.  

On Oct. 31, a judge ordered a preliminary injunction for Weingartz Supply Company, a Catholic-owned business in Michigan. In July, a federal court issued a preliminary injunction halting the mandate for Hercules Industries, a Catholic-owned business in Denver.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Read the complaint in Tyndale House Publishers v. Sebelius.

Read the court’s preliminary injunction order.

Above article sent by Mark Waldeland.