Benghazi: CIA’s GRS, 13 Hours

MAXIM MAN By Adam Linehan 
The plan was to make jack-o’-lanterns. John Tiegen and Mark Geist have brought their families out here, to the scraggly wilds of Tiegen’s 40-acre Colorado property, so the kids can carve pumpkins while the men hunt small game. But the guns prove more appealing to everyone, so the plans converge. “Cover your ears, guys,” Tiegen says as he slaps a 14-round magazine into his NEMO Watchman, the Ferrari of semiautomatic precision rifles. To his right, Geist stares through the scope of his custom AR-15. Then they light up the pumpkins. Orange guts explode. The kids cheer. The men move on to the animals.
“Want me to skin that?” Geist asks, pointing to a rabbit with a bullet in its head. Geist’s family settled on the eastern plains more than 100 years ago. He grew up the way kids here always have, with guns and horses and Wild West lore. He can tell the time using nothing but the horizon and his fist. Point to a random tree or cactus and he knows its name. He, like Tiegen, is a man of self-reliance. And so he places the carcass on the ground, kneels over it, and pulls back the sleeves of his camouflaged jacket. His left forearm is a map of scars. He’s always been proficient with a knife, but these days, his thumb doesn’t flex naturally; he has to compensate, clamping the knife hilt between his fingers and his palm. “I used to be faster at this,” he mutters.
The black memorial bracelet on his wrist flashes in the sun. Tiegen wears one, too. It reads: tyrone “rone” woods, glen “bub” doherty/libya 9-12-12.
Two of the dead in Benghazi.
On September 11, 2012, militants stormed the U.S. consulate in Libya’s second city and killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Of the five armed guards who saved more than 25 lives that night, three have publicly stepped forward: Tiegen and Geist, who live near each other in rural Colorado, and Kris Paronto, who’s in Omaha. (The other two have been identified only by pseudonyms, Jack Silva and Dave Benton.) If you want to know what actually happened in Benghazi, go read something else. The worst night of their lives has already been rehashed ad nauseam, and there are a million contradicting versions to choose from.
The real story of these men—their lives before that night, and their lives after—is far more complex than any conspiracy theory. And now that Benghazi has gone from personal tragedy to national drama, they struggle with how to maintain control of their own stories.
Some tried returning to the battlefield. “I told my son that I was thinking about going back to fight bad guys, and he just about lost it,” Paronto says. He has three kids—an 11-year-old boy, an eight-year-old girl, and a newborn. They grew up with a dad who went off to work in dangerous places and always came home—each time a little rougher around the edges, yes, but all in one piece. Then, after Benghazi, he took a job in Yemen. He’s a professional gunslinger; what else was he going to do? “My little girl, she never used to cry when I left—but when I left to go to Yemen, she cried and cried.”
“I told my son I was going back to fight the bad guys, and he lost it.”
But after going public with their story, that wasn’t an option anyway. The men were ostracized by the CIA and the State Department. No hero’s welcome or ticker-tape parades on their behalf. That’s because they were not soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines. They were private security contractors—a distinction that means very little when bad guys are pointing guns at you, but turns out to mean a lot when you’re back home in America, having just shed blood in the name of your country. They now feel abandoned and disillusioned, and so they’ve retreated to what they know—their land, their families, each other—while they figure out what’s next.
Later in the day, the rabbit skinned and gutted, we hop into Geist’s Z71 4×4 truck. He pulls out his phone, the same one he was carrying when the French 81-mm mortars hit, and shows me a picture of his friend’s gravesite in California. It belongs to one of the men killed by his side in Benghazi. The words fierce patriot are engraved on the headstone. Geist turns on the stereo.
“Ever heard this?” he asks. It’s Radney Foster’s “Angel Flight,” an ode to pilots who fly fallen soldiers home. All I ever wanted to do was fly, the song begins, and Geist eases up the volume. Geist is quiet and direct, dressed head to toe in camouflage. But as we drive past cornfields and grain silos, he begins singing along. Come on brother, I’m taking you home. It’s not a performance; it’s like a man speaking the truest words he knows. He finishes the whole song.

The charred remains of the building where Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith were killed.
What were they even doing in Benghazi? They were just working the next job, in what seemed like a never-ending series of opportunities for men with military experience who preferred to make a living outside the military. All three were reared on God and country in rural Colorado, and each entered the service right out of high school. The grandson of a decorated WWII veteran, Geist saw the Marines as the obvious continuation of a childhood spent hunting, shooting, and being outdoors. “I didn’t see much point in college,” he says. For Tiegen, the Corps was the only perceivable gateway out of town. He spent nearly every day after school hanging out at the local recruitment office until he was old enough to join. Paronto, who played wide receiver at Colorado Mesa University, was preparing to try out for the Broncos when an Army recruiter spotted him in a crowd. “I think he saw sucker written on my forehead,” he says. “He showed me this video of Rangers jumping out of helicopters, and I said, ‘Sign me up!’”
By 2003, the year the U.S. invaded Iraq, all three had completed their military service and were back home. Geist had become a bounty hunter, after a brief stint as his hometown’s police chief. Tiegen was a heating and air-conditioning technician. And Paronto was fresh out of the Army, discharged on medical grounds after doctors diagnosed him with Crohn’s disease. None had seen combat during their service, and all missed the military lifestyle and camaraderie.
The military prohibits soldiers from pulling back-to-back deployments. But there’s another option for people who prefer to make their living in war zones: private security contracting, which provides steadier work and better pay than Uncle Sam. There are plenty of these jobs to go around, as the U.S. increasingly outsources to companies like AirScan and DynCorp, turning military contracting into a multibillion-dollar industry. Tiegen, Geist, and Paronto quickly fell in love with the job; back then, in the early days of George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” coalition forces were scrambling to establish a foothold in the Middle East and private firms were free to operate on the battlefield with little oversight. “It was like the Wild West,” says Geist of his first contracting gig in Iraq with Triple Canopy, in 2004.
In theory, contractors play a strictly defensive role, usually guarding government officials and embassies in war zones. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy usually brought the fight, they were often forced to go on the offensive. That’s what makes contractors so attractive to the Pentagon. They draw fire that would otherwise be directed at American forces, while “not getting counted as boots on the ground or, if something goes wrong, as casualties,” explains Georgetown University professor of security strategies Sean McFate, author of The Modern Mercenary. “They’re invisible people.”
For most of the three men’s careers, the risk seemed manageable. They all eventually landed on the CIA’s Global Response Staff (GRS), an elite paramilitary unit—of contractors—responsible for protecting spies operating in volatile countries, sometimes in places beyond the U.S. military’s reach. Benghazi was one of those postings.
This isn’t the space to relitigate what happened next, but it’s important to know: Tiegen, Geist, and Paronto felt abandoned and expendable. At one point, Tiegen says, he and several other GRS operators were chased through the streets of Benghazi by a group of men armed with AK-47s, and the senior CIA officer in Libya—a man known publicly only by his alias, “Bob”—refused to send help. “Bob treated us like lower class,” says Paronto. When the consulate was stormed, the Pentagon sent a surveillance drone and no additional help.
Nine months after the attack, in the spring of 2013, the team reunited for the CIA’s memorial ceremonies for two of their fallen colleagues, Woods and Doherty. By this point, the events in Benghazi had become a political football; politicians and pundits had plenty to say, but nobody had heard from the guys who were actually there. “Five minutes before the ceremony starts, the CIA hits us with nondisclosure agreements,” says Paronto. “After that, we all sat down and were like, ‘What are we going to do—start telling the truth?’”
This is a question many soldiers have wrestled with after emerging from the battlefield under controversial circumstances. When Dakota Meyer, a former Marine, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Afghanistan in 2009, he used the spotlight to accuse Army commanders of denying crucial artillery support to his besieged unit, which lost four men in a Taliban ambush. Likewise, after Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, a fellow Army Ranger revealed that he had been pressured by his superiors to keep secret that Tillman was accidentally killed by members of his own platoon. In both cases, the results were messy but productive: The government, when publicly chastened by its own heroes, will take action.
Paronto, Tiegen, Geist, and the other two contractors signed the NDA—they didn’t want to cause a fuss at the memorial—but decided to write a book anyway. Less than a year later, their work, 13 Hours, quickly became a best-seller. They were invited onto TV shows and to political rallies. Their careers with the CIA were over, but something new and completely unexpected was beginning. Within six months, Hollywood came calling, too. And that’s how they went from being the secret soldiers of Benghazi to Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. The movie comes out in January.
John Tiegan and his son at home near Colorado Springs.
Can war stories have superfans? This one does. It’s early October, Tiegen’s 39th birthday, and we’re celebrating at his ranch-style house on the outskirts of Colorado Springs. By 7 p.m., the party is in full swing, and kids are chasing each other all over the place. And there’s this woman there. She’s young, attractive, with eager brown eyes. She offers me a Budweiser with a patriotic red, white, and blue label. “The beer of heroes,” she calls it. Then she starts talking about Benghazi.
I’m not expecting this—not here, at least. To Tiegen and the others, Benghazi is almost shorthand for “what you don’t know about me.” They aren’t the Benghazi Guys inside their own homes; they’re just men who survived some awful shit and are out of a job. “We did the right thing, people crapped on us, and here we are,” Paronto once told me. “Really, it’s that simple.” When the guys were on Michael Bay’s movie set in Malta, there to ensure a Hollywood-ish level of realism in the film, the wives didn’t even come along. “It’s their thing,” Tiegen’s wife explains. Home and Benghazi: They can never truly be separate subjects, but the families build the best firewall they can.
This woman didn’t get that memo. I ask her what it is about Benghazi that resonates with her so deeply, and she responds by quoting the book 13 Hours, the way college students cite philosophers. “Numerous times, Jack Silva says, ‘We probably won’t make it out of this one, but we have to keep trying.’ It’s so profound to me,” she says, citing the pseudonym of one of the still-anonymous Benghazi contractors.
The conversation goes on like this. She seems to have the book memorized. I look around the kitchen. Who is this person? In my peripheral vision, wives have congregated, listening, and I get the feeling I’ve stepped out of bounds. The woman then reads me a poem she wrote, titled “2132,” for the time when the attacks began. Later, I excuse myself and ask a few of the wives who the woman is. The best explanation I get is basically: She introduced herself at a book reading, she’s very emotionally invested in the story, and now she’s just around.
“We did the right thing, people crapped on us, and here we are. It’s that simple.
This is the strange phenomenon of losing control of your own experience. Everybody knows at least something about it, and they fit it into their lives in ways big and small. When actor Pablo Schreiber, who plays Paronto in the film, visited Paronto in Omaha, the fathers discovered their sons chasing each other around the backyard with toy guns—“playing,” they said, the Battle of Benghazi.
Sometimes people are even actively disinterested in the honest version of events. The men are regularly invited to speak about their experience, and the first time Paronto ever did, at the Army Navy Club in D.C., the promoter pulled him aside afterward and told him that his speech was depressing. So Paronto went back to his hotel and revised it, to make it more inspiring. “We could’ve given up a bunch of times that night, but we never quit, and we saved lives,” he says now. “ ‘Never quit’—I sign that in all my books.”
Geist and Tiegen are less comfortable speaking before an audience, although they realize that in talking about Benghazi, they can at least draw some income while they figure out what’s next. The money from the movie and the book deal have earned each guy about what he’d have made in two years of overseas contracting—hardly life-changing money, but a welcome stopgap that enables a few small luxuries, like an expensive bottle of scotch. That’s what Tiegen is pouring shots of when I find him downstairs in his basement-turned-man-cave, late into the night at his party. A serious poker game has been going on for hours.
All shots are poured. A doctor told Tiegen that he has fat on his liver, so he’s not supposed to drink, but he allows himself just this one. We raise our glasses.
“To the fallen,” a woman says. I look over to see who said it: It’s the superfan.

Kris Paronto in Omaha, Nebraska.
There’s a Starbucks in a Target in Omaha where Kris Paronto knows everybody’s name. I travel here to visit him before heading to Colorado. “This is my Zen place,” he says, circling the counter to give the woman behind the register a big hug. As she gets started on his “black eye”—a large cup of coffee laced with two shots of espresso, his usual—Paronto explains that this is where he’d always come to clear his head whenever he returned from overseas. “I’d just get my coffee and walk around for hours,” he says. “Contracting isn’t like the military, where they send you to talk to a counselor the second you get off the plane.”
This likely isn’t how the average American imagines a military contractor. The industry’s public reputation was largely established in 2007, when a group of Blackwater employees killed 17 Iraqis in Nisou Square. Contractors seemed like faceless and unaccountable brutes, fueled by sweetheart government contracts that ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Blackwater became such a tarnished brand, the company changed its name twice—to Xe Services in 2009, and then to Academi in 2011.
But outsourced fighting has only expanded since then, and contractors have counted for more than half of the American workforce in Iraq and Afghanistan. When in the field, contractors often take orders directly from the U.S. government. And yet, they’re not entitled to the same medical or death benefits as military veterans. “A lot of these guys are deeply patriotic, but they don’t get any respect,” says McFate, the Georgetown professor. The way he sees it, military contractors are this generation’s Vietnam War soldiers—people who put their lives at risk for the American cause and then came home to a scornful public. “We have an all-volunteer military, so what’s the difference between the soldier who volunteers for the Army versus someone who gets hired by one of these companies? Why is one automatically more noble than the other?”
Paronto certainly agrees with that. He’s a former Army Ranger, but he now feels a kinship with his contracting brethren. Benghazi was just an extreme example of their struggle, he says: They’re protecting innocent people in war zones, and are rewarded with continued hardship and deep suspicion. Now he’s suspicious of the government; a faded don’t tread on me flag hangs from the flagpole in his yard, on the edge of a sloped forest about 20 minutes from downtown.
As speaking requests have rolled in to all three men, Paronto has been the most eager to take them. He gets paid about $5,000 per gig, and he packs his schedule. When we meet, he’s  just booked a talk at Pepsi’s New York headquarters. But he speaks with purpose; he wants to tell a noble story, to change how Americans see and treat contractors. So he’s guarded about the circumstances he puts himself in. When a publicist relays a TV news interview request, he dismisses it. “I’m not going to do it if it’s any of that Bill O’Reilly–type shit,” he says. “I’m tired of the media just using us to push their own agendas.”
Of course, with both the Michael Bay film and the elections looming on the horizon, the real media onslaught has yet to begin. As the House committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks continues to devolve into a political slugfest, more people may turn to Paronto, Geist, and Tiegen for answers. At events, they’re often approached by people with tears in their eyes, heartbroken by the idea that their own government would ever abandon citizens in a war zone. Disillusioned as he is, Paronto’s instinct is to console. Yes, he says, Benghazi was a debacle. It exposed critical weaknesses in the system we trust to protect us. But a few good Americans were willing to step up and risk everything—and that’s our country’s strength, and the story worth telling.
You’re supposed to act different than how you normally do, because you’re in the limelight,” Tiegen says. “That’s probably the most annoying thing. I’m not going to change.” What would need changing, anyway? That’s open to speculation. Certainly, he’s not a character that every social corner of America would understand. He’s wary of the government, which may be why he’s currently teaching his three-year-old son how to shoot an AR-15. But whatever: Let America have its book and movie about his life, because he doesn’t want to read or watch either anyway. They both start with his friends alive and end with them dead. “I know what’s coming,” he says.
How will they move on from Benghazi? It’s a question they ask themselves. Sure, the experience has led to paid speaking gigs and some level of fame, but to what end—to just relive their worst experience over and over again? “All these people I don’t even know want to be buddy-buddy,” Geist says. “The principal at the local school calls me Hollywood. ‘Hey, Hollywood!’” Meanwhile, they’re still suffering a physical toll. Geist has endured 14 surgeries and still has only partial mobility in his left hand. His short-term memory has also yet to fully recover from the explosions. Tiegen suffered smoke inhalation, which scorched his lungs and left him with a perpetual cough. He now has thoracic outlet syndrome, which drained his strength by what he says is about 50 percent. “I tried going back to work,” he says, “but when we’d go to the shooting range, my pistol would just fly out of my hands.”
Interest in them will fade. This can only last for so long. They know it. “Once we’re no longer the flavor of the month, what do I do?” Paronto says. “I don’t get to do what I love anymore.”
Geist wants to show me what he’s been planning, so we hop in his truck and drive down amid the cactus-dotted hills and alfalfa fields. He started breaking and riding horses as a young boy on this land, and raised hogs for pocket money. For fun, he and his friends would make bets to see who could sneak up closest to an antelope and shoot it with a .22 pistol. “We rarely got them,” he says, “but it taught me how to use the terrain.”
Once we’re no longer flavor of the month, I don’t get to do what I love.
We drive past a house he bought for $20,000. He’s been renovating it ever since he returned from Benghazi. “It’s been good therapy,” he says. Then we head to an old tomato cannery on the edge of town. Inside, in a dimly lit nook, shelves are stacked with copies of 13 Hours. Photographs of Woods and Doherty hang on the walls. Geist hands me a flyer for Shadow Warrior Project, the foundation he and his wife recently started. The flyer reads: “To honor our brothers who are contracted to serve their country silently behind enemy lines and through their heroic and courageous acts have fallen or been injured.”
As we’re leaving his office, Geist turns to me and says, “Tiegen deserves a medal for what he did that night. If he hadn’t pulled me off that roof, I’d be dead.”
That evening, back at Tiegen’s, we all settle into the man cave to watch the trailer for Bay’s 13 Hours on his big-screen TV. After that, we stumble upon one of the Internet’s all-time lamest video genres: people filming themselves watching movie trailers. 13 Hours has proved to be a popular muse. We pull one up. “It didn’t feel really right or left wing, just kind of natural,” says a gangly hipster with a slash of bleached hair across his forehead. Geist and Tiegen are intrigued, so we watch another. Then another. And then we find one that features a bulky dude in a gray Aeropostale shirt. He’s sitting in a small apartment—his refrigerator is visible on the left of him, and his bed on the right—smirking and brow-furrowing his way through the trailer. I watch Geist and Tiegen as they watch this guy, who wants other people to watch him watch a movie based on the lives of the people I’m watching. And then Aeropostale Guy turns to the camera—in effect, turns to Geist and Tiegen—and says, “Hmm, true story, told Michael Bay–style,” and he laughs. “So you know it didn’t go exactly like that.”
Tiegen stands and flips on the lights. He’s done. But Geist remains seated.
“Yeah,” Geist says, staring at the screen. “It’s a true story.”

US Admits Iran Will Punk the World on the JPOA

The US never really expected Iran to come totally clean about a key element of its nuclear program

 BusinessInsider: The Iran nuclear deal will clear a crucial milestone on December 15, when the International Atomic Energy Agency submits a report on the extent of Iran’s previous nuclear-weaponization activities.

The completion of that investigation into the possible military dimensions (PMDs) of Iran’s nuclear program is one of the major prerequisites for the full implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the landmark nuclear deal that Iran and a US-led group of six countries signed in July.

iran nuclearREUTERS

In theory, the JCPOA won’t be implemented unless Iran complies with a separate “roadmap” agreement with the IAEA. That agreement, which was signed the same day as the JCPOA, lays out the parameters of the agency’s weaponization investigation. The JCPOA isn’t supposed to go into effect unless the sides “fully implement” that roadmap agreement.

But “full implementation” doesn’t really have a fixed meaning within the JCPOA, an agreement that is voluntary and non-binding. And according to an Associated Press analysis out Monday, the IAEA’s investigation is likely going to have inconclusive results.

As the AP notes, the head of the IAEA has “been careful to diminish expectations, describing his upcoming report last week as ‘not black and white.'” And according to the AP, Iranian officials have spoken about the IAEA probe using similar language, “suggesting they already know that the agency’s conclusions won’t be damning.”

Iran has already threatened that it simply won’t comply with the JCPOA if it’s dissatisfied with the IAEA’s report. That might be more than just an empty ultimatum, since according to the AP the announcement is consistent with what Iranian diplomats are saying behind closed doors as well.

“Two Western diplomats familiar with the issue say those same threats have been made in negotiations with IAEA officials,” the AP reported.

The weaponization report is considered crucial to the successful implementation of the nuclear deal, as it will be used to formulate an inspection baseline for Iran’s nuclear program. There is extensive evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapons program until as late as 2003.  The IAEA needs to be able to identify key personnel, facilities, supply chains, and past activities to establish exactly how far along Iran’s weaponization activities really are and to recognize whether those activities have been restarted.

But as the AP’s analysis suggests, the roadmap is also contentious — and perhaps even inconvenient, given its potential to interrupt the smooth implementation of a deal that Iran and the US-led group spent nearly two years negotiating. There are already signs that the US wants to get past the investigation as smoothly as possible — even if the IAEA’s “roadmap” doesn’t result in Iran’s full disclosure of its past weaponization work.

Business Insider has obtained a State Department document submitted to congressional offices during the Congress’s review of the JCPOA in July.

The 18-page document, a “verification assessment report” that is essentially the department’s outline of the nuclear deal’s various stipulations, is unclassified. But congressional staffers were only allowed to read it inside of a SCIF, or a special area for viewing and storing classified or compartmentalized information.

The section entitled “Addressing ‘Possible Military Dimensions'” discusses the US’ interpretation of the IAEA “roadmap” and its requirements.

“Iran’s implementation of its commitments under the Roadmap will bring to an end the years-long delay in the IAEA’s ability to address PMD [Possible Military Dimensions] issues,” the document reads.

Two paragraphs later, it explains that even with this high level of confidence that the IAEA investigation will resolve the PMD issue, the US’ standards fall somewhat short of full Iranian disclosure on weaponization-related matters.

“An Iranian admission of its past nuclear weapons program is unlikely and is not necessary for purposes of verifying JCPOA commitments going forward,” the report reads. “US confidence on this front is based in large part on what we believe we already know about Iran’s past activities”

“The United States has shared with the IAEA relevant information, and crafted specific JCPOA measures that will enable inspectors to establish confidence that previously reported Iranian PMD activities are not ongoing,” it continued. “If credible information becomes available regarding any renewed Iranian efforts, it would be shared with the IAEA as appropriate, whether involving previous people, locations, entities, or otherwise. We believe other IAEA member states will do the same.”

This report was circulated in Congress not long after the deal was signed. From a relatively early stage, the State Department believed that the IAEA was capable of monitoring Iran’s nuclear program without Iran fully disclosing its past activities.

This wasn’t because of any particular US trust in the Iranians. Rather, it was due to State’s confidence that US intelligence already knew enough about the extent of Iran’s weaponization program to make such an admission of past weaponization work unnecessary.

Even so, State apparently never expected full Iranian transparency on weaponization. And the Obama administration believed that Iran had no responsibility to admit to a past weaponization program under the JCPOA.

Washington always intended to give Iran a pass on full disclosure — and the result may be a watered-down IAEA investigation that’s treated more as a formality than as an integral element of an arms control agreement designed to last for decades.

The United States has it’s own Task Force, that is IF the White House allows full technology to monitor Iran.

Task Force to assess technologies in support of future arms control and nonproliferation treaties and agreements. The Task Force, however, quickly realized that addressing this charge alone would be of limited value without considering a broader context for nuclear proliferation into the foreseeable future. That realization resulted from a number of factors which included:

 Accounts of rogue state actions and their potential cascading effects;

 The impact of advancing technologies relevant to nuclear weapons development;

 The growing evidence of networks of cooperation among countries that would otherwise have

little reason to do so;

 The implications of U.S. policy statements to reduce the importance of nuclear weapons in international affairs, accompanied by further reductions in numbers, which are leading some longtime allies and partners to entertain development of their own arsenals;

 The wide range of motivations, capabilities, and approaches that each potential proliferator introduces.

 

Newest Emails Released, Hillary Told She Rocked

Some samples of the recent released emails are here. Additional summaries are here.

An exchange with Sid-vicious Blumenthal, in the emails where it is suggested that investigative author Bob Woodward is an FBI asset?

 

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FNC: As the number of classified Hillary Clinton emails grew to nearly 1,000, they also reveal how freely she and her staff shared information on the Benghazi attacks, including confirming the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens – and even celebrating her controversial hearing appearance where she asked, “What difference, at this point, does it make” what led to the attacks.

The emails were part of the largest release yet of Clinton documents from the State Department.

The batch contained 328 emails deemed to have classified information. According to the State Department, that brings the total number with classified information to 999.

That alone drew outrage from Republicans, with the RNC saying the sheer number of emails with classified material “underscores the degree to which Hillary Clinton jeopardized our national security and has tried to mislead the American people.”

But the document dump also potentially creates more problems for Clinton in her attempt to move past the fallout from the Benghazi attacks.

Notably, the emails show her aides congratulating her after her initial January 2013 testimony on the attacks before Congress. During that hearing, she got into a dispute with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., over the conflicting narratives about the motivation for the attack and what preceded it – the State Department had come under fire for initially pointing to a protest over an anti-Islam film. Clinton told Johnson, expressively, “what difference, at this point, does it make?”

During and after the hearing, aides forwarded Clinton congratulatory messages.

“I’m being flooded with emails about how you rocked,” deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin wrote. “And you looked fabulous.” One supporter wrote a message with the subject line: “twitterverse abuzz with Hillary-kvelling,” using the Yiddish word for gushing praise.

Later, though, political consultant Mark Penn sent an email to Clinton gently suggesting that perhaps it wasn’t wise to lose her temper in the hearing. Penn suggested Republicans could use that moment as evidence that they had rattled her.

Aide Philippe Reines leaped to Clinton’s defense, writing:

“Give Me A Break. You did not look rattled. You looked real. There’s a difference. A big one.”

The emails from September 2012 also show her and her staff scrambling to respond the night of the attacks and later calibrating their public response.

On the night of the attacks, the communications show Clinton notifying top advisers of confirmation from the Libyans that then-Ambassador Stevens had died.

Early the next morning, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills tells Clinton they “recovered both bodies” and were looking to get out a statement; Sean Smith, information management officer, was the other State Department employee killed that night.

After a controversy erupted over claims the attack was “spontaneous,” aide Jake Sullivan wrote to Clinton to assure her, “You never said spontaneous or characterized the motives. In fact you were careful in your first statement to say we were assessing motive and method. The way you treated the video in the Libya context was to say that some sought to *justify* the attack on that basis.”

Further, the emails show that shortly before 9 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2012, Clinton sent an email asking her daughter to call her at her office about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The email was addressed to an account under the name “Diane Reynolds,” an alias Chelsea Clinton used for personal messages.

“Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an al-Qaida-like group: The Ambassador, whom I handpicked, and a young communications officer on temporary duty w(ith) a wife and two young children,” Hillary Clinton later wrote to her daughter. “Very hard day and I fear more of the same tomorrow.”

In October, that email was trumpeted by Republicans on the House Benghazi committee as evidence that Clinton knew very quickly the attack on the consulate was the work of Islamic terrorists, not a spontaneous street protest triggered by the release of a video considered an insult to the Prophet Mohammed.

Another exchange from early 2013 shows retired diplomat James Jeffrey appearing to do damage control over a Washington Post piece from him titled, “How to Prevent the Next Benghazi.”

Jeffrey starts the conversation by warning Mills he’d been contacted by the Post regarding his views and reluctantly agreed to comply. He warns it would be posted and “you may see this piece as critical of expeditionary diplomacy. It’s not; I’ve risked my life practicing it. But having lost over 100 personnel KIA and WIA (and two ARBs judging me) in my time in Iraq (and a son going back to Afghanistan on Department assignment this summer) I feel very strongly that we have to be prudent. If the media ask me if there is any daylight between me and you all I will cite the Pickering Mullen ARB and the Secretary’s testimony and say absolutely not.”

Forwarding the article, he adds, “(Title is not what I gave them and stupid as I state explicitly at the end that being in Benghazi was the right policy call).”

Russia Expanding Military Footprint, Who is Watching?

Russia Building New Military Bases On Islands Claimed By Japan

MOSCOW — Russia has begun building two modern military compounds on the far eastern Kuril islands, defence minister Sergei Shoigu said Tuesday, heightening long-running tensions with Japan over the disputed islands.

Russia is “actively carrying out construction of military compounds on the islands of Iturup and Kunashir,” Shoigu said at a meeting with military top brass, according to the ministry’s website.

Relations between Moscow and Tokyo have been strained for decades because of the status of the four southernmost islands in the Kuril chain, known as the Northern Territories in Japan.

Some 19,000 Russians live on the remote rocky islands, occupied by Soviet troops in the dying days of World War II.

The two countries have never officially struck a peace treaty and the lingering tensions over the issue have hampered trade ties for decades.

The Russian ministry said the new military buildings would help “raise the combat readiness of troops on the eastern frontiers of Russia.”

Altogether, Russia plans to put up 392 pre-fabricated buildings on the islands, including schools, kindergartens, leisure centres and dormitories, with construction work continuing through the winter.

“This year, the priority is finishing the most essential buildings and the engineering infrastructure” to receive troops and equipment, Shoigu said.

In September Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev visited the island of Iturup and surveyed troops there, angering Japan.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has ruled out any compromise on the islands, telling his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida in September that Tokyo must acknowledge “the postwar historical realities.”

Russia has recently poured in investments to the region and reconstructed the Japanese-built airport on Kunashir.

Russia adding 2nd airbase in Syria, pursuing ‘expansion’ in military campaign

FNC: Russia has expanded its military operations in Syria to include a second airbase as well as other posts, according to a U.S. official briefed on the latest intelligence from the region – even as President Obama expresses muted optimism that Russian President Vladimir Putin eventually will “shift” his strategy and work with the West.

Moscow’s presence has grown to a total of four forward operating bases, including recently added bases in Hama and Tiyas. But the most concerning to the Pentagon is the second airbase in Shayrat which can support fixed-wing aircraft, greatly expanding Russia’s capability for airstrikes, which began on Sept. 30.

“The Russians are operating helicopters out of Shayrat airport, but they are making [preparations] to land fixed-wing aircraft,” another U.S. official confirmed to Fox News.

Shayrat is located 25 miles outside of the Syrian city of Homs, an hour drive from neighboring Lebanon.

Since September, Russia has based its warplanes and helicopters at Basel al-Assad airbase in Latakia, one of the last remaining Assad strongholds along the Mediterranean coast. While the Pentagon cannot confirm any Russian military jets have landed at Shayrat, there are reports Russia has landed aircraft in the past few hours.

Russia’s two other forward operating bases are used to land its attack helicopters employed to defend the Assad regime against Syrian rebels.

But when asked if the move to expand to a second airbase was defensive in nature in case Syrian rebels succeed in destroying the Latakia base, one of the U.S. officials pushed back.

“This is an expansion, not a defensive move at all,” the official said. He said Syrian rebels were nowhere close to taking the Russian airbase in Latakia.

The expansion comes as Russia spars with other world powers over its Syria approach.

While the Obama administration is trying to persuade Moscow to focus its efforts on taking out Islamic State targets, Russia is known to be targeting U.S.-backed rebels tasked with weakening the Russia-backed Assad regime. Obama acknowledged this during a press conference Tuesday, while also voicing hope that Russia at some point will cooperate.

While Russia’s military involvement has stoked tensions with the U.S., it has led to a direct confrontation with Turkey.

One Russian Su-24 strike aircraft was shot down by Turkey last week – and on Monday, the U.S. State Department for the first time publicly backed Turkey’s claims that the Russian warplane had entered Turkish airspace.

A Russian Mi-8 transport helicopter then sent to rescue the downed pilots was destroyed with a U.S.-made TOW anti-tank missiles by Syrian rebels. After those incidents, the Russians now have 31 warplanes and 15 helicopters – thought to be at Latakia.

Obama, discussing Putin’s calculations, said Tuesday that the situation in Syria is “not the outcome he is looking for.”

But critics will point to Russia’s expanding influence – not just in the Middle East but in eastern Ukraine, since Russia annexed Crimea and sent troops into eastern Ukraine to support a separatist movement in 2014. The Obama administration had vowed to isolate Russia over the incident.

Obama said in October he does not want a proxy war in Russia, but the CIA’s arming of rebels in Syria and Russia’s airstrikes indicates the U.S. is already engaged in one.

A senior defense official also said Turkey was “really pissed” when Russia bombed Turkmen rebels fighting Assad in Syria, ethnically tied to Turkey, and warned Russia on multiple occasions not to invade its airspace before shooting down the Russian Su-24 last week.

Obama, speaking in Paris Tuesday, alluded to the different sides the United States and Russia have taken in Syria’s civil war.

“So long as they are aligned with the regime, a lot of Russian resources will be targeted at opposition groups that will be part of an inclusive government that we support,” he said.

Obamacare Co-op in NY Refusing New Patients

WatchDog: The Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan, or Co-Op, portion of the health care law established nonprofit health insurers that would receive federal funding and were intended to compete with private, for-private insurers on the exchanges as a way to lower prices. They were supposed to be small-scale single-payer systems that would be free from the profit motive; a progressive’s dream solution to the problem of providing health insurance for all.

Instead, they’ve turned into a nightmare. So far, 12 of the 23 co-ops have failed, defaulting on more than $1.2 billion in federal loans. Only two have been able to break even so far, and most of the remaining co-ops are eyeing massive premium increases – as high as 40 percent in some cases – to stay solvent.

A government program being poorly run is nothing new, of course. But the co-ops established under the health care law were subject to a series of regulations that make you wonder how they were ever supposed to succeed in the first place.

Collapse of NY’s largest Obamacare co-op has doctors refusing new patients

HotAir: Back in the middle of November we covered the announcement that one of the largest New York health insurance providers under the Obamacare co-op umbrella was in trouble. Health Republic had jumped on the Affordable Care Act bandwagon and signed up nearly a quarter million new subscribers, offering cut rate prices and surging to the top of the market in that area. Unfortunately, the expected cash bonanza from the government program failed to live up to expectations and the company quickly ran out of operating capital. Yesterday was the end of the line for Health Republic and they closed their doors.

Unfortunately for the citizens of New York, this failure didn’t just represent a blow to the company’s profits and the reputation of the White House’s signature legislative achievement. There have been real world consequences for the people who signed up for the plan, including running into doctors who won’t even accept appointments from people using the company’s services. (From The Watershed Post)

The shuttered company is no longer paying its claims, leaving doctors unsure whether they will ever be paid for seeing Health Republic patients. Some doctors have turned patients away, or are bargaining directly with patients over their medical fees…

Health Republic’s collapse has forced a panicked scramble among patients and doctors in upstate New York. Local doctors have worried that Health Republic will default on bills, and at least one practice, the Llobet Medical Group, has turned away patients who have Health Republic insurance.

“This was one of the biggest disasters ever,” said David Cordner, an administrator at Llobet Medical Group, a primary care practice with offices in Margaretville and Kingston. “I don’t understand why New York didn’t see this a lot sooner. Nobody got paid. Where was the money going?”

Where was the money going? Several New York legislators are asking exactly that question since a lot of taxpayer dollars were flushed down this rat hole before it was finally closed. Health Republic had received $265 million in federal loans to get started and that money has pretty much evaporated. Two state senators along with U.S. Congressman Chris Gibson have called for an investigation and are asking Governor Andrew Cuomo to explain where the money went and what he plans to do to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

“$265 million of taxpayer money disappeared and 215,000 New Yorkers are facing turmoil in their healthcare coverage,” he told the Watershed Post. “There is no question that there needs to be an investigation to see where there was wrongdoing. This happened on Governor Cuomo’s watch.”

Some of the personal stories which Watershed Post dug up are precisely the sort of outcome which people had feared, They talked to Candace Rudd, the owner of a hair salon, who called her doctor for an appointment and was told that her insurance was no longer accepted. They were willing to give her an appointment, but wanted a $100 cash payment to get in to see the doctor. Whether or not she’s able to afford that, there are far too many families who couldn’t in upstate New York’s struggling economy.

This is the larger, national potential for Obamacare on a local level. More than half of the state exchanges have closed at this point and nearly all the rest of them are in financial peril. But with the law in place, what happens to all of the collapsed segments of the system? Legally the states can’t simply walk away, but someone still has to pay the bills. Care to guess who that’s going to be?