Hicks’s Full Account of Night of Benghazi Attacks
Full testimony at yesterday’s House of Representative’s subcommittee by Gregory Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in the U.S. embassy in Libya:
Official Offers Account From Libya of Benghazi Attack — WASHINGTON — A State Department official presented a minute-by-minute account on Wednesday of what happened during the seige of the diplomatic compound in Benghazi last Sept. 11, offering the first public testimony from an American official …
Benghazi: Incompetence, But No Cover-up — The hearings deepen the tragedy, but not the scandal. — There was tragic incompetence, plainly, in the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attacks, and even possibly some political calculation. It is a record that may well come …
Failings of Bam & Hill laid bare — After a remarkable House hearing yesterday, we can say this with almost complete certainty: The Obama administration knew perfectly well that last year’s Sept. 11 attack on Americans and American facilities in Benghazi was a terrorist act …
A Coverup Laid Bare — Thanks to House Republicans, Americans finally got to hear from the State Department officials the Obama administration never wanted to testify. They are now called “whistleblowers,” but that’s only because their accounts of what really happened in Libya on Sept. 11 …
Earlier today I listened to a blogger call on tomorrow’s Center for Security Policy’s conference, Chavismo without Chavez
Frank Gaffney, Michael Braun, Former Assistant Administrator and Chief of Operations, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and Jon Perdue, Director of Latin American Programs at the Fund for American Studies, talked about tomorrow’s topics, particularly the collective threat Venezuela, Hezbollah, the FARC and Iran present to the Western Hemisphere and the US homeland.
I had the opportunity to ask Jon Perdue is it would be correct to assume that Timothy Tracy‘s detention in Venezuela (like Alan Gross‘ in Cuba) on espionage charges is orchestrated by Cuba. Perdue’s reply was yes, and both men are now political pawns of Cuba, which not only controls all of Venezuela’s intelligence services, but also the issuing of passports and ingress and egress into Venezuela.
My other question was to Michael Braun, are the direct flights from Iran to Venezuela still continuing after Hugo Chavez’s death? He replied yes.
After the CSP presentation, the call had Col. Alan West, who talked about tomorrow’s 9:30 AM-11:30 AM press conference by three families of Navy SEAL Team VI special forces servicemen,
The areas of inquiry at the press conference will include but not be limited to:
1. How President Obama and Vice President Biden, having disclosed on May 4, 2011, that Navy Seal Team Six carried out the successful raid on Bin Laden’s compound resulting in the master terrorist’s death, put a retaliatory target on the backs of the fallen heroes.
2. How and why high-level military officials sent these Navy SEAL Team VI heroes into battle without special operations aviation and proper air support.
3. How and why the military brass carries out too many ill-prepared missions to boost their standing with top-level military brass and the Commander-in-Chief in order that they can be promoted.
4. How the military restricts special operations servicemen and others from engaging in timely return fire when fired upon by the Taliban and other terrorist groups and interests, thus jeopardizing the servicemen’s lives.
5. How and why the denial of requested pre-assault fire may have contributed to the shoot down of the Navy SEAL Team VI helicopter and the death of these special operations servicemen.
6. How Afghani forces accompanying the Navy SEAL Team VI servicemen on the helicopter were not properly vetted and how they possibly disclosed classified information to the Taliban about the mission, resulting in the shoot down of the helicopter.
7. How military brass, while prohibiting any mention of a Judeo-Christian God, invited a Muslim cleric to the funeral for the fallen Navy SEAL Team VI heroes who disparaged in Arabic the memory of these servicemen by damning them as infidels to Allah. A video of the Muslim cleric’s “prayer” will be shown with a certified translation.
The press conference will be livestreamed. I’ll post a link on it tomorrow.
“True the Vote can now begin reconstruction and review of the 18th Congressional District election race between Colonel Allen West and Patrick Murphy,” True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht said. “We must stop this scandalous cycle of ignoring failures in our electoral process when the campaigns and cameras go home. Understanding how failures in administration can effect elections, as we saw in St. Lucie County, will help prevent them from occurring in the future. We cannot allow slipshod standards to become pandemic across our country’s election processes – citizens can and will stand up in defense of election integrity.”
U.S. diplomats have been denied access to California man Timothy Tracy, 35, who is being accused by the government of being a spy and foment postelection unrest.
Tracy, a director and producer at Los Angeles-based Freehold Productions, had filmed retired general Antonio Rivero when the general was advising students how to protect themselves from armed chavista gangs who roam in motorcycles during opposition protests.
The procedure uses a technique called follicle-hair extraction, in which doctors remove clusters of hair from the more hirsute areas of the body and implant them along the lip or cheeks to magnify a mustache or beef-up a beard.
We’ll draw a curtain over what “more hirsute areas of the body” they’re talking about.
One thing for sure, Venezuela’s Madurito Bandido doesn’t need no steenkin’ implants: he’s got the biggest mustache in the hemisphere,
Argentina has to re-learn this lesson every two decades, it seems like: socialism is a one-way ticket to the poorhouse. Someone ought to remind them of Einstein’s aphorism that insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
I don’t think that Argentina has really internalized that lesson, at least in the past 80 years.
Now Ms. Soler is taking advantage of the dictatorship’s new travel policy—that for the first time in a half-century allows Cubans to take trips abroad—to ask the international community for “moral and spiritual support” for the Cuban people in their struggle against the dictatorship.
She wants the world to know of Castro’s racism. Blacks, she says, are grossly underrepresented in the universities and overrepresented in prisons. “The beggars in Cuba are black, not white. The marginalized are blacks, not whites.” She adds: “They tell me ‘Negra, what are you doing? You have a lot to thank the revolution for!’”
Repression is on the rise, and in the absence of international condemnation the regime feels free to administer publicly the beatings the Ladies in White endure in order to show who’s boss. The regime used to send women only to attack the Ladies but now they send men as well. They punch the Ladies with the clear intent to hurt them. They sometimes break bones.
Ms. Soler says that these attackers “never have been neighbors” spontaneously defending the glorious revolution. They are professionals working for the Interior Ministry or civilians who obey the regime in order to keep their jobs or their place in university classrooms. Ms. Soler says that for the past two years many of “the same faces” have consistently shown up to attack the group. The woman who bit Laura Pollan is well known by the Ladies because she is a regular on the goon squad and works for the ministry.
It is chilling to think what might happen to the politically incorrect Ms. Soler when she returns to Cuba, which is what makes her trip to Rome this week so crucial.
She has asked to see Pope Francis. If he agrees, the visit might protect her. Without it, and in the absence of other influential international voices coming to her defense, her fate is less certain.
Exactly how Cinco de Mayo turned into the signature celebration of the United States’ 52 million Hispanics is a bit of a mystery—especially since it is hardly celebrated in Mexico outside of the State of Puebla. Cinco de Mayo has no association with Mexican independence. It commemorates a battle on May 5, 1862, in which the Mexican army vanquished the well-equipped French forces of Napoleon III.
No one knows exactly why Hispanics in California began celebrating Cinco de Mayo at the end of the 1860s.
It was a good excuse for a party?
What we do know is that in the 1970s cultural organizers in San Francisco selected Cinco de Mayo from among a slate of holidays as the best pan-national Latino celebration in the U.S. It was a savvy choice. Most Mexicans had never heard of the holiday, so it didn’t carry the risk of pitting different Hispanic nationalities against one another.
I had never heard of cinco de mayo until quite recently, either. Neither had several friends and acquaintances from Latin America, who found out about it once they moved to the USA.
What does The Most Interesting Man in the World have to say about this?
Nicolás Maduro first said the yankis were going to kill Henrique Capriles, then he said the Salvadorans were plotting to kill Maduro, and now’s saying that Colombian ex-president Alvaro Uribe is plotting to kill him, too,
“Uribe is behind a plot to kill me,” Maduro said in a televised speech. “Uribe is a killer. I have enough evidence of who is conspiring, and there are sectors of the Venezuelan right that are involved.”
Yesterday Maduro also said he’d “willing to talk to the Devil for the peace of Venezuela”, while casting aspersions on the opposition (video in Spanish),
Rather than worrying about Uribe, Maduro ought to keep en eye on Diosdado, or he may get his wish sooner than he thinks.
Michael Hirsh / NationalJournal.com:
The big news this week, 
