I love how the righties have now quit calling the place "Benghazi" and have now added a few more words to its official name. Now it's "Benghazi, the world's hotbed of terrorism". When did it get this new name and who bestowed it upon this poor town? I am sure that the Benghazi tourist bureau and the Benghazi chamber of commerce, not to mention the Benghazi Realtors association are FURIOUS at this new name. What about Benghazi (I'm using the old name) was so terribly MORE dangerous than Tripoli or any other city in Libya last fall? Couldn't the ambassador have had his auto convoy ambushed and attacked anywhere and the results might very well have been four dead Americans? He went to Benghazi. Bad guys chose to attack him there. I would suggest that republicans realize that it is the organizations that create THOSE bad guys that are the real enemies of the USA.... NOT the president.
http://www.curiosityaroused.com/world/10-most-dangerous-cities-in-the-world/
Oddly enough, "Benghazi the world's hotbed of terrorism" did not make the list. Neither did plain old "Benghazi".
:0) WOW ..
U.S. knew for years of Benghazi extremism
Senior State Department, defense and intelligence officials were well aware that Benghazi and its surrounding area harbored al Qaeda-linked extremists long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in the eastern Libyan city.
Benghazi became famous last year as the birthplace of the revolution that swept Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi from power.
But in recent interviews with The Washington Times,
several former high-level officials explained that eastern Libya was notorious in Washington’s counterterrorism community for more than a decade as a hub for jihadists leaving for or returning from insurgencies abroad.
The agencies’ long-standing knowledge about Islamic extremists in Benghazi raises questions about the level of security at the U.S. Consulate on Sept. 11, when heavily armed militants stormed the diplomatic mission and a CIA annex and killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, State Department officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
The officials pointed to the 2007 seizure by coalition forces in Iraq of a treasure trove of documents that highlighted the town of Darnah, just east of Benghazi, as one of the top destinations in the world from which foreign fighters were recruited to join al Qaeda’s insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq.
In 2008, a secret cable from a U.S. diplomat in Libya, later posted by WikiLeaks, reported that many people in Darnah “take great pride” in their town’s public reputation as the source for such large numbers of foreign fighters and suicide bombers — “invariably referred to as ‘martyrs,’” the cable reads.
The association of Darnah and Benghazi with violent jihad goes back much further than the insurgency in Iraq, and predates even the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S.
Always a hotbed
Eastern Libya was home to many Libyans who had left to join the first global jihadist insurgency — against the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1980s, said Aaron Y. Zelin, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In the 1990s, Libyan veterans of the Afghan jihad launched an insurgency in eastern Libya under the banner of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which Gadhafi forces crushed. The group split with al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks, predicting that they would be disastrous for the global jihadist movement.
“Benghazi and Darnah were always viewed as an Islamist hotbed,” said Mr. Zelin, noting that extremists are not the majority in either town.
The documents recovered in 2007 in Iraq, which came to be known as the Sinjar records — named after a town on the Syrian-Iraqi border where the material was seized from an al Qaeda commander — included the identities and hometowns of hundreds of foreign fighters in Iraq.
“The info was picked up by special ops, and a very powerful decision was made not to treat it as intel but to declassify it and give it to the State Department so that it could be dealt with from a diplomatic approach and then to release the information academically,” said one former official with intimate knowledge of the discovery.
The result was a two-part report produced by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
Titled “Al Qaeda’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq,” the report showed that Libya ranked second only to Saudi Arabia as a country of origin for foreign fighters. The data shocked many U.S. analysts, who previously had not assessed Libya as a significant source of foreign jihadists.
Of 112 Libyans identified, 52 had come from Darnah and 21 from Benghazi, according to the report, which noted that this made Darnah the single-largest town of jihadist origin in the Arab world.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news...or-years-of-benghazi-extremism/#ixzz2TTL0uo8T
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter
By the way Mr. I Don't Know Shit .. I'm much further to the left than you are. You're much closer to being a right-winger than I am.
