Libya: 1 year after Bengazi

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anatta

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Libya: Car bomb hits foreign ministry in Benghazi


A powerful car bomb exploded Wednesday near Libya's Foreign Ministry building in the heart of the eastern coastal city of Benghazi, security officials said, exactly one year after an attack there killed the US ambassador and three other Americans.


The early morning blast targeted a building that once housed the US Consulate under the rule of King Idris, who former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi overthrew in a 1969 bloodless coup.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...i-8809437.html

another Obama stellar foreign war.
 
One year later, Benghazi's lingering issues

One year after the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, no arrests have been reported but the Justice Department says investigators have made "very significant progress

Last month, government officials confirmed that sealed criminal charges have been filed against suspects. They are said to include Ahmed Khattalah, who gave interviews in Benghazi with several news organizations admitting he was at the scene of the attacks but insisting he was not the "ringleader." Khattalah also said that nobody from the U.S. government had attempted to question him.


Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and other Republican members of Congress recently sent a letter urging the new FBI Director James Comey to make Benghazi a top priority. Graham said that intelligence operatives have told him they have leads on suspects "but can't get approval to go after them."


A spokesman for the Justice Department tells CBS News that "the success of this investigation is a top priority" but would not provide details on its progress "to preserve its integrity."


White House spokesman Jay Carney, in a statement released Tuesday night, said, "We remain committed to bringing the perpetrators of the Benghazi attacks to justice and to ensuring the safety of our brave personnel serving overseas."


Benghazi remains a dangerous place, with militant groups continuing to attack offices of the relatively weak central government.
Marking the one-year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. buildings, a bomb went off Wednesday outside a Foreign Ministry office in the city, causing significant damage but no confirmed deaths.


The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., told CBS News: "Although progress in bringing to justice the perpetrators of the Benghazi attacks may not be as rapid as we may want, I am confident that our law enforcement and national security officials around the world are fully committed to this goal."



Information gaps

The Obama administration continues to keep a great deal of information under wraps citing an ongoing investigation, national security and other reasons. The secrecy is an ongoing point of contention with Republicans in Congress.


Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry demanding the Bengahzi survivors be made available for interviews with Congress or else they may be subpoenaed.


According to the letter, the State Department told Congress on Aug. 23 that "it was not prepared to support the request for transcribed interviews." If that doesn't change within two weeks, committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said "I will have no alternative but to consider the use of compulsory process."


The FBI, CIA, Director of National Intelligence, Defense Department, State Department and National Security Agency have rejected or failed to answer multiple Freedom of Information (FOI) requests made by CBS News, as well as appeals of the denials. The agencies cite exemptions related to ongoing investigations or national security.

Innocence of Muslims" filmmaker in custody

The only person connected in any way to the attacks known to have been arrested and gone to prison is the Egyptian filmmaker who produced the controversial "Innocence of Muslims" video: Nakoula Nakoula. However, the arrest wasn't for making the video, which is a legal, constitutionally-protected exercise of free speech. It was for violating his probation in an earlier bank fraud case dating back to 2010.


Obama administration officials initially blamed the film's trailers posted on YouTube for inspiring what they termed a "spontaneous" uprising against Americans in Benghazi. Family members of the victims say when the bodies were flown back to the U.S., Clinton told them the U.S. government would "make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted."


Obama administration officials will not identify the supposed crime the filmmaker had committed. Critics, including Graham, say Clinton knew from the start that terrorists were likely to blame for the attacks and accuse her of faulting the video to divert blame at the height of the President's re-election campaign.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57602348/one-year-later-benghazis-lingering-issues/

more crap if you can digest it this early in the morning..
 
annata said:
should have put this in current event, but it is "off topic" in that Libya isn't covered.
Click to expand...

It may take years, eventually there will be found a tie connecting CIA, Benghazi, Syrian 'rebels.' Obama funding al queda.
 
As the insiders on the Right realized that Senator Clinton's term as Secretary of State was coming to an end, and that President Obama was about to get re-elected, and that she is the clear heir to President Obama's legacy they began to panic. A terrorist organization attacked us on 9/11, one year ago today and they pounced on it, trying to use this terrorist attack to their own political advantage. They are dancing on the graves of the heroic Americans who lost their lives in that terrorist attack.

Wild conspiracy theories fill the holes in the narrative of the events that occurred that day. The American people have their eyes wide open, and when the issue raised its head in the second to last presidential debate, President Obama nailed the final nail into Romney's political coffin by calling him out on the manufacturing of this issue.

Senator Clinton will do the same if her challenger tries to hang a Benghazi sign around her neck. If her challenger is smart and not desperate, he will avoid the issue all together.
 
Annie said:
It may take years, eventually there will be found a tie connecting CIA, Benghazi, Syrian 'rebels.' Obama funding al queda.
Click to expand...
Libyan weapons all over Syria, methinks the CIA annez was smuggling them there? again no proof.
 
Lawlessness and Ruin in Libya

A little under two years ago, Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, urged British businessmen to begin “packing their suitcases” and to fly to Libya to share in the reconstruction of the country and exploit an anticipated boom in natural resources.


Yet now Libya has almost entirely stopped producing oil as the government loses control of much of the country to militia fighters.

Mutinying security men have taken over oil ports on the Mediterranean and are seeking to sell crude oil on the black market. Ali Zeidan, Libya’s Prime Minister, has threatened to “bomb from the air and the sea” any oil tanker trying to pick up the illicit oil from the oil terminal guards, who are mostly former rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi and have been on strike over low pay and alleged government corruption since July.


In an escalating crisis little regarded hitherto outside the oil markets, output of Libya’s prized high-quality crude oil has plunged from 1.4 million barrels a day earlier this year to just 160,000 barrels a day now. Despite threats to use military force to retake the oil ports, the government in Tripoli has been unable to move effectively against striking guards and mutinous military units that are linked to secessionist forces in the east of the country.

Libyans are increasingly at the mercy of militias which act outside the law. Popular protests against militiamen have been met with gunfire; 31 demonstrators were shot dead and many others wounded as they protested outside the barracks of “the Libyan Shield Brigade” in the eastern capital Benghazi in June.

Though the Nato intervention against Gaddafi was labeled as a humanitarian response to the threat that Gaddafi’s tanks would slaughter dissidents in Benghazi, the international community has ignored the escalating violence. The foreign media, which once filled the hotels of Benghazi and Tripoli, have likewise paid little attention to the near collapse of the central government.

The strikers in the eastern region Cyrenaica, which contains most of Libya’s oil, are part of a broader movement seeking more autonomy and blaming the government for spending oil revenues in the west of the country. Foreigners have mostly fled Benghazi since the American ambassador, Chris Stevens, was murdered in the US consulate by jihadi militiamen last September. Violence has worsened since then with Libya’s military prosecutor Colonel Yussef Ali al-Asseifar, in charge of investigating assassinations of politicians, soldiers and journalists, himself assassinated by a bomb in his car on 29 August.

Rule by local militias is also spreading chaos around the capital. Ethnic Berbers, whose militia led the assault on Tripoli in 2011, temporarily took over the parliament building in Tripoli. The New York-based Human Rights Watch has called for an independent investigation into the violent crushing of a prison mutiny in Tripoli on 26 August in which 500 prisoners had been on hunger strike. The hunger strikers were demanding that they be taken before a prosecutor or formally charged since many had been held without charge for two years.

The government called on the Supreme Security Committee, made up of former anti-Gaddafi militiamen nominally under the control of the interior ministry, to restore order. At least 19 prisoners received gunshot shrapnel wounds, with one inmate saying “they were shooting directly at us through the metal bars”. There have been several mass prison escapes this year in Libya including 1,200 escaping from a prison after a riot in Benghazi in July.

The Interior Minister, Mohammed al-Sheikh, resigned last month in frustration at being unable to do his job, saying in a memo sent to Mr Zeidan that he blamed him for failing to build up the army and the police. He accused the government, which is largely dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, of being weak and dependent on tribal support. Other critics point out that a war between two Libyan tribes, the Zawiya and the Wirrshifana, is going on just 15 miles from the Prime Minister’s office.

Diplomats have come under attack in Tripoli with the EU ambassador’s convoy ambushed outside the Corinthia hotel on the waterfront. A bomb also wrecked the French embassy.

One of the many failings of the post-Gaddafi government is its inability to revive the moribund economy. Libya is wholly dependent on its oil and gas revenues and without these may not be able to pay its civil servants. Sliman Qajam, a member of the parliamentary energy committee, told Bloomberg that “the government is running on its reserves. If the situation doesn’t improve, it won’t be able to pay salaries by the end of the year”.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/...ruin-in-libya/

just freaking read it, before you jump to Obama's defense. this the result of our "humanitarian war"
 
I thought you wanted the middle east reformed by the people who live there?

Remember all the talk the right used to do about spreading democracy?
 
Your guy shook up the bottle of bees and took the shit cork out of the bottle remember?

you cheared
 
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