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Hillary Clinton Covered Up Boko Haram’s Acts of Terror
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On June 10, 2014 @ 6:03 pm In The Point | 6 Comments
We already knew that the State Department fought to prevent the Al Qaeda linked terrorist group Boko Haram from earning its FTO designation.
But Senator Vitter now casts some light on how far the State Department and Hillary were willing to go so that Boko Haram would not be named a terrorist group and so that the State Department could keep pressuring Nigeria to appease the Islamic terrorist group.
U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry demanding answers on why the State Department, under the leadership of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, misled Congress on the terrorist threat posed by Boko Haram, a terrorist organization based in Nigeria.
“The State Department ignored clear evidence that Boko Haram posed a serious terrorist threat for years – costing hundreds of lives. And not only did Secretary Clinton ignore outside intelligence from the FBI and Defense Department, but she ignored the actual data State Department was supposed to use for its own reports to Congress. It really looks to me like she deliberately misled Congress and the American people,” Vitter said. “I want to know why it took Hillary Clinton and the State Department so long to actually acknowledge this threat – and what they were hiding in the process.”
Here’s an important excerpt from the Senator’s letter.
As part of its annual assessments on foreign country terrorism, the State Department is required to include statistical information supported by data. However, a review of the information from that time presents different facts. In its capacity as the U.S. government’s authoritative, central, and shared knowledge bank on international terrorism the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) provided the State Department with the statistical information necessary to determine that Boko Haram was engaged in terrorist activity. However, in completing the official annual CRT provided to Congress the State Department chose not to include this information.
The Secretary of State is required to include within its CRT to Congress, “which acts of international terrorism occurred which were, in the opinion of the Secretary, of major significance.” However, in multiple cases, where the NCTC clearly labeled and claimed that Boko Haram was engaged in terrorist activity against foreign nations, Secretary Clinton’s office in their own report minimized the attacks and separated the issue from Boko Haram.
How big of a difference was this? Senator Vitter provides a comparison.
The NCTC 2012 Annex of Statistical Information, stated that Africa “experienced 978 attacks in 2011, an 11.5 percent increase over 2010, and attributable that in large part to the more aggressive attack tempo of the Nigeria-based terrorist group Boko Haram”.
This document adds further citations that Boko Haram conducted an attack against Western targets in “the largest terrorist attack in the country to date.”
However, the State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism’s report covering that same year (2011) only chose to include loose evidence stating, “[The] conflict in Nigeria continued throughout the northern part of the country with hundreds of casualties as indigenous terrorist attacks increased. The Nigerian extremist group, Boko Haram, claimed responsibility for some of these attacks.
It appears that this variation in wording fails to meet the legal requirements based on information it received, and inserts a higher degree of doubt about whether Boko Haram is directly engaged in terrorist activity. The modification clearly downplays “978 attacks” and ignores the NCTC labeling Boko Haram as a “terrorist group,” instead suggesting that there may be a loose connection.
The State Department was deliberately obstructing and covering up information that showed what Boko Haram was up to. State Department functionaries like Johnnie Carson distracted and diverted from the subject whenever they were asked about it. And at the top was Hillary, who claimed to be all about the empowerment of girls, but was protecting a terrorist group that would kidnap them.
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