Wash. Times: Pentagon Didn't Trust Hillary State Dept. on Libya
Thursday, 29 Jan 2015 06:58 PM
By Cathy Burke
Secret recordings claim Hillary Clinton's State Department cherry-picked intelligence on Libya that created a justification for intervention in its 2011 civil war and passed it on to U.S. officials, The Washington Times reports.
The tapes, which undermine Clinton's case for America siding with the rebels, show top Pentagon officials and a senior congressional Democrat were so distrustful of Clinton that they set up backdoor talks with the Gadhafi regime, The Times reports.
"You should see these internal State Department State Department reports that are produced in the State Department that go out to the Congress," an intermediary dispatched by the Joint Chiefs of Staff tells the Gadhafi regime in July 2011, the newspaper reports.
"They’re just full of stupid, stupid facts," the intermediary says, adding the State Department was controlling what intelligence would be reported to U.S. officials.
The Times notes the Gadhafi regime at that time was fighting a civil war that grew out of the Arab Spring – and was battling Islamist-backed rebels who wanted to dethrone the longtime dictator.
Clinton had argued Gadhafi might engage in genocide and create a humanitarian crisis and ultimately persuaded President Barack Obama, NATO and the United Nations to authorize military intervention, the newspaper notes.
But in the recordings, Gadhafi's son Seif Gadhafi tells the American officials he's worried Clinton was using false pretenses to justify unseating his father and insisted the regime had no intention of harming civilians, the newspaper reports.
"It was like the WMDs in Iraq. It was based on a false report," Seif Gadhafi says in a May 2011 phone call to Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, referencing the George W. Bush administration's accusations of weapons of mass destruction to lobby Congress for an Iraq invasion, the newspaper reports.
"Libyan airplanes bombing demonstrators, Libyan airplanes bombing districts in Tripoli, Libyan army killed thousands, etc., etc., and now the whole world found there is no single evidence that such things happened in Libya," he says.
He also warns many of the U.S.-supported armed rebels were "not freedom fighters" but rather jihadists whom he described as "gangsters and terrorists," the tapes show, the newspaper reports.
"And now you have NATO supporting them with ships, with airplanes, helicopters, arms, training, communication," he says in one conversation, the newspaper reports. "We ask the American government send a fact-finding mission to Libya. I want you to see everything with your own eyes."
American Thinker notes "the news here is that any intelligence to the contrary was apparently squelched, and the trio of Clinton, [then-Office of Multilateral and Human Rights Director Samantha] Power, and [then-U.N. Ambassador Susan] Rice shaped the debate over Libya to maneuver the U.S. into an unnecessary war."
But James Baker, who served under President George H.W. Bush, told The Times the story also shows an extraordinary break in policy.
"If this story is true, it would be highly unusual for the Pentagon to conduct a separate set of diplomatic negotiations, given the way we operated when I was secretary of state," he told the newspapers.
"In our administration, the president made sure that we all sang from the same hymnal."
American Thinker writes proving Clinton and the State Department manipulated intelligence to get the United States involved in the Libyan civil war "will be difficult."
"But if intelligence officials who were in a position to know believe that to be the case, it will be a powerful argument supporting the facts of Clinton's deception," American Thinker writes.
"Considering how Libya has turned out – a failed state racked by civil war, with the Islamic State now moving in – Hillary Clinton has a lot to answer for."
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