Category Archives: Libya Benghazi Muslim Brotherhood murder

How a Terrorist Thinks

Posted on by

مركز المسبارal Mesbar Studies and Research Center

*****

   The Grey Zone:  Giulio Meotti writes on the April 4, 2016 Gatestone Institute website about the disturbingly high support among young European Muslims for suicide bombings and the Islamic State’s pursuit of establishing a new Caliphate.  Mr. Meotti writes that “among young European Muslims, support for suicide bombings range from 22 percent in Germany, to 29 percent in Spain, 35 percent in Britain, and 42 percent in France,” according to a recent PEW Research poll.  “In Britain, one in five Muslims have sympathy for the Caliphate; and, today, more British Muslims join ISIS than the British Army.  In the Netherlands,” the PEW Research poll showed that “80 percent of the Dutch Turks see “nothing wrong,” in ISIS.”  And, according to a ComRes report, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 27 percent of British Muslims have sympathy for the terrorists who attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris.  An ICM poll, released by Newsweek, revealed that 16 percent of French Muslims support ISIS; and, the number rises to 27 percent among those aged 18-24.  In dozens of French schools, the “minute of silence,” was interrupted by Muslim pupils who protested it,” Mr. Meotti wrote.

”How deep is ISIS’s popularity in Belgium?,” Mr. Meotti asks.  “Very deep,” he warns.  “The most accurate study is a report from The Voices From the Blogs, which highlights the high degree of pro-ISIS sympathy in Belgium.  The report monitored and analyzed more than two million Arabic messages around the world via Twitter, FaceBook, and blogs regarding ISIS’s actions in the Middle East.”

“The most enthusiastic comments about ISIS come from Qatar at 47 percent, then Pakistan at 35 percent, third overall was Belgium — where 31 percent of the tweets in Arabic on the Islamic State are positive — more than Libya (24%), Oman (25%), Jordan (19%), Saudi Arabia (20%), and Iraq (20%).”

    Overall, some 42 million people in the Arab world sympathize with the Islamic State, according to polling data examined by The Gatestone Institute.

     As Mr. Meotti notes, “even if these polls and surveys must be taken with some caution, they all indicate a deep, and vibrant “gray zone,” which is feeding the Islamic Jihad in Europe and the Middle East.  We are talking about millions of Muslims who show sympathy, understanding, and affinity with the ideology and goals of the Islamic State.”

     The shockingly high support for the Islamic State among the youth of Europe is a foreboding sign.  As eminent British historian Max Hastings recently wrote, the influx of millions of Muslim migrants into Britain and the rest of Europe, may fundamentally alter the character and culture of Europe — and, not necessarily for the better.  While Mr. Hastings appreciates and understands that Britain and the rest of Europe and the West need to accept a large number of these displaced refugees as new citizens — he has this recent warning in London’s The Daily Mail Online:  “If any significant fraction of the hundreds of millions suffering hardship, persecution and famine in Africa and the Middle East succeed in transferring themselves to Europe, I fear that our civilization will be transformed in ways most of us cannot endorse, nor even find tolerable.”

     “How many [more] Muslims will this ISIS virus be able to infect in the vast European “gray zone?” Mr. Meotti asks.  “The answer will determine our future,” he adds.

There is more from IPTNews:

For weeks, Farid Bouamran, a Dutch-Moroccan immigrant who has lived 30 years in Amsterdam, watched as his son Achraf became increasingly radicalized, tuning in to videos and Twitter accounts online. Within two months, Achraf had traded in his jeans for a dishdasha, or robe, grown a beard, and begun spending time online with Belgian youth his father once called “men with long Arabic names: Abou this and Abou that.”

Panicked, Bouamran took every measure he could think of to intervene: he brought Achraf to his own mosque to hear the imam speak of a peaceful Islam. He canceled his son’s Internet account, forbid him to see his radical Muslim friends, and even followed him when he went out at night.

It was no use. Just after Christmas 2013, Farid Bouamran sat in his living room with officers from Dutch intelligence agency AIVD and told them he believed Achraf was about to leave for Syria to join in the jihad. Please, he begged them. Take his passport. Stop him.

Not to worry, the officers assured him, he won’t get past our borders.

But he did get past, flying out of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport the next night to Turkey, and from there, making his way to the Islamic State.

A year later, disillusioned by the realities of the life he found there, Achraf determined to return home. But en route to the Netherlands in January 2015, a U.S. missile attack on Raqqa took his life. He was 17 years old. More on the post is here.

 

7 Questions on the Hillary Email Investigation, Only 7?

Posted on by

At least some in Washington DC are asking some questions. What questions do you have? Here is a question…Where are the emails between Hillary and the White House especially Barack Obama?

7 lingering questions in the Clinton email investigation

TheHill: The FBI appears to be entering the home stretch of its investigation into Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton private email server.

Yet even as arrangements are reportedly being made to interview Clinton and her top aides, much remains unclear.

The FBI under Director James Comey refuses to publicly discuss the investigation, as is customary, but critics say the lingering questions show the review is anything but routine and could result in criminal indictments.
Here’s a look at what is still not publicly known.

When will the investigation end?

The FBI’s investigation had dogged Clinton’s presidential campaign since last summer. The longer it goes, the more likely it is to damage to her chances of winning the Democratic nomination and the White House.

Reports indicate that the bureau is sprinting to complete its work so it won’t be seen as meddling in the presidential election.

Still, according to Clinton, the FBI has yet to reach out to her to schedule an interview, despite reports that she and other top aides could soon be brought in for questioning.

“They haven’t,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this weekend. “But, you know, back in August, we made clear that I’m happy to answer any questions that anybody might have. And I stand by that.”

What law(s) might have been broken?

Top officials at the FBI and Justice Department have refused to discuss what charges — if any — might result from the investigation.

Speculation about the charges has centered on federal statutes prohibiting against removing federal documents, especially 18 U.S.C. § 2071. A portion of that law bars officials from “willfully and unlawfully” concealing, removing or destroying federal records.

Other laws identified by the watchdog group Cause of Action include prohibitions against removing defense-related information “from its proper place of custody” and against removing classified information to keep “at an unauthorized location.”

Critics also say Clinton or her top aides may have violated internal State Department procedures about handling classified information.

Who’s in the crosshairs?

Clinton is the highest-profile name floated as a possible target of the FBI’s probe, but she isn’t alone.

According to Al Jazeera, the FBI is also seeking to interview Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and ex-spokesman Philippe Reines. Questions have also mounted about longtime aide Huma Abedin, Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy and former State Department official Jake Sullivan, who authored more emails now considered classified on Clinton’s server than anyone else, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

A conservative legal watchdog group has asked for eight people to testify in a separate court case relating to Clinton’s server, including Mills, Abedin, Kennedy and IT official Bryan Pagliano. In that case, a federal judge said current and former State Department officials could be questioned about whether the department willfully circumvented the Freedom of Information Act.

Pagliano, who is believed to have been responsible for setting up the server in Clinton’s Chappaqua, N.Y., home, was granted immunity in exchange for his cooperation with the FBI.

What would the government have to prove to file charges?

Perhaps the biggest question for the bureau is whether there was the intent to “willfully” remove government documents, or whether Clinton’s situation was merely an oversight, as she has claimed.

None of the thousands of emails that Clinton handed over to the State Department were marked as classified, the government has said, but classified information can appear in unmarked emails as well.

Upon entering office, Clinton signed a nondisclosure agreement vowing to protect classified information, whether it is “marked or unmarked.”

Last week, the State Department halted its internal probe of whether 22 emails that have been deemed top secret — the highest level of classification — were classified at the time they were sent. The department said it was deferring to the FBI’s investigation.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who served under President George W. Bush, has said the evidence suggests that Clinton knew at least some of the information was sensitive, and yet kept it on her personal server anyway.

“The simple proposition that everyone is equal before the law suggests that Mrs. Clinton’s state of mind … justifies a criminal charge of one sort or another,” Muksaey wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

How much will the FBI say?

The Justice Department is in a difficult spot, as it is likely to face a political backlash no matter what it decides in the Clinton case.

Many conservatives already doubt that the Obama administration is willing to pursue an indictment connected to the Democratic presidential front-runner. Lack of formal charges might merely be viewed as proof that the process was not above-board.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has pressed for the FBI to release the evidence collected during its investigation once the probe is concluded — regardless of the outcome — to reassure the public that political considerations did not play a role in the Department’s decision.

To avoid concerns about impartiality, Grassley and other prominent Republicans have pressed for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special independent prosecutor to handle the Clinton investigation.

So far, she has denied the request.

Was the server secure?

Clinton’s camp has refused to outline precisely which digital protections she used to safeguard the information on her private server.

Independent cybersecurity analysts have concluded that the server went at least two months without using standard encryption protections that make data inaccessible to hackers.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in January said “the odds are pretty high” that foreign spies in China, Russia or Iran would have gotten access to Clinton’s data.

Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, testified before Congress that, for foreign intelligence agencies, the server “would represent opportunity.”

Clinton only gave about half of the approximately 60,000 emails she sent while secretary of State to the federal government for record keeping. The rest of the messages, she said, were purely personal in nature and were deleted.

The claim set off a firestorm in Washington, with many Republicans and transparency advocates fretting that Clinton and her team had unilaterally decided to delete half of her email correspondence, without affirming with the government that it was truly personal.

It remains unclear whether those messages can be recovered from the server or if they will ever be released.

 

The FBI, DoJ, Hillary and Lawyering UP

Posted on by

Just this week, the FBI sent a request to the U.S. State Department to stop all server and email investigations and the State Department has complied. Formal letters have been dispatched the key Hillary people for scheduling upcoming interrogatories with regard to the server and emails.

*** Clinton Aide Abedin ‘Terrified’ of What May Be in Emails

What is quite interesting as you continue to read the American Thinker piece below is the matter of Beth Wilkinson. Who is she that she seems to know just about all the heads of the various departments at main Justice?

 

DailyCaller: The wife of CNN political analyst David Gregory is the attorney representing Hillary Clinton’s ex-aides in the FBI’s investigation into her private server usage, raising concerns of a possible conflict of interest.

It was reported by Politico on Friday that Gregory’s wife, Beth Wilkinson, is representing four of Hillary Clinton’s former state department staffers in the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s use of private email. Wilkinson is a former federal attorney who prosecuted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Gregory, who used to be the host of “Meet the Press,” has joined CNN as a political analyst, and most of his work will be done on their morning show “New Day.”

Politico’s report doesn’t mention that Wilkinson is Gregory’s wife until the fourteenth paragraph. They also mention that according to FEC records Wilkinson is a donor to both the Clintons and the Democratic Party.

CNN has not returned multiple requests for comment on whether Gregory will be discussing Clinton on TV and whether viewers will be made aware of this conflict.

Gregory is not the first TV newsman to be connected to Clinton. MSNBC host Chris Matthews’ wife’s congressional campaign is largely funded by Clinton donors.

Four Hillary aides hire joint defense counsel

AmericanThinker:

Politico yesterday revealed that four of Hillary Clinton’s aides – not including Huma Abedin and Bryan Pagliano – are using the same high-powered, well-connected D.C. lawyer for their counsel as they face likely FBI questioning over their role in the private server/classified email and possible criminal referral.  The group includes chief of staff Cheryl Mills; her deputy chief Jake Sullivan; Heather Samuelson, also on Mills’s staff; and Philippe Reines, who served as Clinton’s spokesman at State.

The lawyer in question, Beth Wilkinson, has served as a high-profile Justice Department prosecutor, in-house general counsel for Fannie Mae following its scandals (for undisclosed but likely substantial compensation), and a partner in two top law firms prior to setting up her own boutique law practice in January of this year.

As Politico notes:

The united front suggests they plan to tell investigators the same story — although legal experts say the joint strategy presents its own risks, should the interests of the four aides begin to diverge as the probe moves ahead. (snip)

Hiring the same attorney allows Clinton’s advisers to have one gatekeeper for most of the DOJ’s inquiries — and it likely indicates that they expect to offer substantially similar testimony if they’re questioned. Lawyers are barred from simultaneously representing people who may have conflicting interests in an investigation, or who would say something negative or potentially legally harmful about the lawyer’s other clients, experts say, although some such conflicts can be waived by the clients.

Thus, the aides’ decision to use a so-called “joint-representation” or “common-defense” strategy suggests the staffers believe they’re in this together and are unlikely to turn on each other.

On the other hand, if one of the aides ends up in criminal jeopardy as part of the probe, choosing a “common-defense” strategy could mean trouble for that staffer, who may need to say something adverse about his or her attorney’s other clients.

“The premise of employing the same counsel is that they believe there is not likely to be a situation where they start pointing a finger at one another to save their own skins — or perhaps at Secretary Clinton,” said Dan Metcalfe, founding director of the DOJ’s office of information and privacy. “And there’s a sense that if one of them goes down, they all go down. It shows they think they can coordinate the defense to everyone’s benefit.”

Metcalfe, now a law professor at American University, called it an “optimistic approach”: “They must believe prosecutors don’t have that much.”

It is unclear when the agreement for joint counsel was made.  Senator Grassley quizzed Wilkinson late last year about who is paying her for serving as counsel and was rebuffed on the ground of client confidentiality.  It is clear, however, that Hillary Clinton would be the outside party positioned to benefit from a unified set of answers among her aides, and also in a position to pony up the large sums a lawyer like Wilkinson would charge.  But if and when any differences in responses appear in testimony, the aides will face heightened peril, as their common attorney will face a conflict of interest in whom to protect.

It was necessary for the Department of Justice to grant exemption from conflict-of-interest rules for this arrangement to be legal.  That seems to indicate that the DoJ is not neutral in the case, something Joe DiGenova sees clearly:

DiGenova questioned why the DOJ would greenlight the arrangement in the first place, arguing that it “presents an amazing conflict of interest” and allows for coordination of stories.

“If it’s a serious case, you don’t run the risk of having all sorts of collusion between people — it’s just not done,” said diGenova. “If the department has accepted that, that tells me they’re walking down the line of not bringing a case, because they’re not serious if they have accepted that arrangement … They’ve thrown in the towel.”

The DOJ declined to comment.

If all goes as Hillary plans, this arrangement will surely benefit her.  But if the FBI has information that the four people do not anticipate and they give conflicting answers, then the arrangement could blow up on her.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/04/four_hillary_aides_hire_joint_defense_counsel.html#ixzz44ovyf93z
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Rising Threats, Increased Marine Duty

Posted on by

Barack Obama at nuclear summit: ‘madmen’ threaten global security

Barack Obama used his final nuclear security summit on Friday to deliver the stark warning that “madmen” could kill and injure hundreds of thousands of innocent people using only plutonium the size of an apple.

“The danger of a terrorist group obtaining and using a nuclear weapon is one of the greatest threats to global security,” said Obama, convening the meeting of more than 50 world leaders in Washington.

Obama argued that since the first such summit six years ago, the world has measurably reduced the risk of nuclear terrorism by taking “concrete, tangible steps”. Enough material for more than 150 nuclear weapons has been secured or removed, he said. More here.

*****

Rand: In light of the global increase in the number and lethality of terrorist attacks, it has become imperative that nations, states, and private citizens become more involved in a strategic vision to recognize, prepare for, and — if possible — prevent such events. RAND research and analysis has provided policymakers with objective guidance and recommendations to improve preparedness, international collaboration, response, and recovery to this global threat. Various summaries here.

Here’s where the Marines have stood up new embassy guard posts after Benghazi

MarineTimes: The Marine Corps is taking big steps to help prevent another attack like the one on a diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 that left four Americans dead.

The service has established about two dozen new Marine security guard detachments and beefed up 117 others as part of a multifaceted plan to protect U.S. embassies and consulates around the globe.

Twelve additional locations will get new security detachments by 2018 as the Corps boosts its number of embassy guards to counter increasing threats and attacks against diplomatic facilities.

The new detachments are be located across the continents in places like Turkey, China, Lebanon, Sierra Leone and South Africa. The locations are not confined to third-world countries where anti-American sentiment is strong; Marines are also boosting their presence in places like Italy, Laos and Mexico.

New Marine security guard detachments:

Land-based Marine crisis response units are also equipped and trained for events such as the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. No MSG detachment was present there or in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, which prompted lawmakers to better protect diplomatic personnel and facilities across the globe.

The boost is necessary, even amid a military drawdown, said Col. Rollin Brewster, the commanding officer of the Marine Corps Embassy Security Group.

“The world is a dynamic, changing place,” he said. As the Marine Corps works through what that new normal looks like, the expansion provides greater anti-terrorism measures — what he called “meaningful work that matters.”

The changes have the full backing of the Obama administration and Congress, and have been well received by diplomats and Foreign Service officers. In fact, the State Department has another 15 diplomatic posts where officials would like to add MSG detachments in coming years. This would put a Marine presence nearly 200 embassies and consulates.

Commandant Gen. Robert Neller recently told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the Marine Corps now has 174 embassy guard detachments in 147 countries. Of those, 44 qualify for hostile fire pay and 22 are designated as combat zones.

However, some ambassadors who have served in the most challenging locations say there’s one important step missing. They strongly recommend the Marine Corps and State Department review assignment policies and update decades-old rules of engagement to better address evolving and emerging threats.

“I would urge a rethink of detachment ROE to give an ambassador greater flexibility in how to deploy the Marines in a contingency,” said retired Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who has served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon. “Those ROEs have not changed in probably three decades. The world has.”

The embassy security plus-up

In 2013, Congress mandated that the Corps add 1,000 new Marine security guards, which essentially doubled the size of the Embassy Security Group. The move allowed the service to keep an additional 1,000 Marines at the end of its post-war drawdown.

Neller said the Corps has thus far added 603 of those 1,000 Marines. About 200 are assigned to new Marine security guard detachments, and another 274 have been sent to boost existing detachments. The remaining 130 are assigned to the Marine Security Augmentation Unit, which can dispatch teams of MSGs to embassies in distress at the direct request of an ambassador, chief of mission or regional security officer on the ground.

The Marine Corps is working closely with the State Department to stand up each new detachment, Brewster said. The State Department must meet certain diplomatic and logistics requirements prior to activating new MSG detachments.

The Embassy Security Group works with diplomatic security personnel to determine the detachment size needed at new locations. It can take up to a year to stand up new units, but normally less if existing conditions are good.

The new teams are composed of seasoned Marine security guards with at least one 12-month tour at another post. The group is encouraging Marines to extend their special duty assignments, if possible.

Sgt Maj. Juan Alvarado, the Embassy Security Group’s top enlisted Marine, recently visited the new Iraq detachment. He said the Marines there were motivated.

“They all kept saying, ‘This is what I signed up for,’” Alvarado said.

Filling the gaps 

The Marine Corps’ mission to keep embassies safe expands far beyond traditional Marine security guard duty.

The Marine Security Augmentation Unit, or MSAU, stood up in July 2013 as a quick reaction force that can augment embassies at a moment’s notice.

Each squad-sized team is assigned to a region. The Virginia-based unit has been tapped for about 60 missions so far, including a call to beef up security at the U.S. Embassy in Paris in November following the series of sophisticated attacks there by members of the Islamic State group.

Embassy guards are also supported by three new land-based special-purpose Marine air-ground task forces. Each is assigned to a specific combatant command and can be tailored to respond to crises at diplomatic posts in that part of the world. They support U.S. Africa, Central and Southern commands. The units have dispatched infantrymen to patrol diplomatic compounds and have helped evacuate personnel at embassies in places like Libya and South Sudan. The crisis response forces can also augment Marine Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Teams, which are dispatched to embassies in distress.

Additionally, the Marine Corps has used infantry companies to fill security gaps in places like Iraq, Libya and Yemen. A Marine company was assigned to secure the compound when Crocker opened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, after the fall of the Taliban. Since they were infantrymen, he said they were not bound by “restrictive rules of engagement.”

But such scenarios are not common outside of combat zones. The typical MSG detachment has only eight Marines: one staff NCO who serves as detachment commander, and seven sergeants and below. The largest detachments have 24 Marines.

Boosting the size of detachments at high-risk embassies allows Marines to patrol the perimeter, provide internal security for the chancery, and adds one more trigger puller — should things heat up.

All of those missions have led to new training for Marines.

At the MSG schoolhouse at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, the Embassy Security Group is wrapping up the third and final phase of a 10-acre training compound. It includes barracks; a $10 million, 29,000 square-foot training facility with seven functional guard stations; an Indoor Simulated Marksmanship Trainer system; and a new group headquarters modeled after actual U.S. embassies.

Marines deploying with crisis response units also undergo nonlethal weapons training for riot situations. Grunts deployed to Europe recently spent three days at the U.S. Embassy in Portugal where they were tasked with securing a facility overrun by terrorists, active shooters and violent rioters.

The prevalence of embassy security missions is also evident at Infantry Officer Course, where lieutenants now regularly conduct long-range rescue training missions.

Rethinking rules of engagement 

Ambassadors and Foreign Service officers have lauded the plan to boost the number of Marines at embassies and consulates. But some caution that “throwing Marines at the problem” is not enough if the embassy doesn’t get the right MSGs — and if those MSGs don’t get the right rules of engagement.

Retired Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Yemen from 1997 to 2001, said officials need to take a careful look at the precarious situations diplomats sometimes find themselves in.

“I do think every U.S. Embassy should have a contingent of Marine security guards, without question,” she said. “… [But] there has to be a recognition of the limits placed on Marines. There does need to be a very careful thinking through of the rules of engagement.”

An MSG’s primary duties include access control, safeguarding classified material and emergency response. While protection of personnel is assumed, the MSGs remain limited to designated areas and have strict rules that govern engagement. Security is instead managed by nearly 800 State Department regional security officers in more than 250 posts worldwide.

In a time of need, they call on combat-equipped troops like FAST Marines to provide security. Assuming that help may not arrive on time, some feel the Marines at the embassies should be tasked with defending their fellow Americans.

Crocker, who reopened the embassy in Kabul, has seen MSGs in action on more than one occasion in his 37 years of service. When a mob breached the embassy walls in Syria in 1998, the small MSG detachment was ready. Countless hours of training enabled them to launch tear gas at precise points and quell the uprising.

“That’s just one example of what a half-dozen of America’s finest can do at maybe 2,000 miles from the nearest reinforcements,” said Crocker, who in 2012 became only the 75th civilian to be named an Honorary Marine since the Corps’ founding in 1775. “In such places, that’s all you’ve got — those Marines.”

But sometimes those Marines are not enough. Because their rules of engagement are too restrictive, Crocker opted for a Lebanese security force when he reopened the Beirut embassy in 1990.

“I needed to be sure we could fight in any way we might need to, not just to defend the chancery building but to defend on the wire,” said Crocker, who pointed out that the compound was surrounded by a heavily wired perimeter rather than a wall. “So instead of a Marine detachment, I brought in additional regional security officers who could shoot anywhere I told them to shoot.”

Maj. Clark Carpenter, a Marine spokesman at the Pentagon, said Corps officials “continually” have conversations with the State Department on how to improve security. That’s “absolutely critical and something we take very seriously,” he added.

“We always want to look at ways to improve our security and keep the enemy off balance,” Carpenter said.

Bodine called Marines “a tremendous addition to every embassy,” adding that they should have been in Benghazi and could have made a significant difference there. But she still cautioned against turning embassies into something that looks like an armed camp. To do so could project hostility and adversely affect the embassy’s  mission.

“There is a drive to make our embassies perfectly safe so that nothing bad ever happens to anybody. The only way to do that is to keep people inside the walls,” she said. “But embassies cannot be fortresses, and diplomats can’t be hermetically sealed in embassies and still do their job.”
Bodine now serves as director of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. Her 30-plus years in Foreign Service were spent primarily on Arabian Peninsula, including a tour as deputy chief of mission in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion and occupation in 1990-1991 (for which she received the Secretary’s Award for Valor).

While she would want no other force guarding the compound, she does feel that young Marines may not always be the best choice to face the increasingly complex threats faced at the most at-risk embassies.

“They are really good guys and I absolutely adore them, but they are really, really young,” she said. “The Marines may have to think about sending more seasoned, at least [in their] late 20s. I have quite literally on occasion entrusted my life to those 19- and 20-year-olds, but the … change in mission is going to take someone with just a little bit more time under his belt.”

All MSGs currently serve 12 months at three posts, while detachment commanders serve 18 months at two posts. Marines typically aren’t sent to the more challenging posts until their second assignment. Even then, many are not of legal drinking age back in the U.S.

 

 

 

 

Clinton Foundation Donor’s Flight

Posted on by

Bombshell: Clinton Foundation Donor’s Flight From Justice Aided by Hillary Allies

Clinton donor smeared a decorated DEA agent and helped crooked Venezuelan friends escape justice

Observer: Recent news reports indicate that the FBI is investigating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for granting favors to her family’s foundation donors and for its systematic accounting fraud. In January, the Sunday Times of London cited former Judge Andrew Napolitano, a conservative libertarian and frequent Fox News guest, as saying that the FBI was taking evidence “seriously” and that Hillary “could hear about that soon from the Department of Justice.”

It’s hard to believe that the Obama administration and its hideously politicized Justice Department would ever indict Ms. Clinton, given that President Barack Obama picked her for secretary of state and its clear favoritism toward her in the presidential race. But there is massive evidence that shows financial abuses—including money laundering—at the Clinton Foundation and overwhelming evidence that donors were helped by Ms. Clinton.

To take one of so many examples, there’s the case of Clinton Foundation donor Claudio Osorio—who is now housed at a federal prison serving 12 years for fraud—who in 2010, with Ms. Clinton’s (and Bill Clinton’s) help, won a $10 million loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

The loan was granted to an Osorio firm called InnoVida, which was supposed to build houses in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Instead, Osorio pocketed the money and used it to underwrite his lavish lifestyle and to pay off politicians. For political muscle, Osorio—who also had close ties to Jeb Bush, who sat on the board of a bank he owned—paid a lobbyist and major Hillary fundraiser named Jonathan Mantz.

Claudio Osorio's mugshot.

Claudio Osorio’s mugshot. (Wikimedia Commons)

And that leads me to another Clinton Foundation donor Ms. Clinton helped out who happened to use Mr. Mantz (who now runs Ms. Clinton’s presidential campaign Super PAC) and apparently with the same great effect: Gonzalo Tirado, a crooked Venezuelan financier.

Mr. Tirado was president of and ran Venezuelan operations for the famously corrupt Stanford Bank, which was headquartered in Antigua and was named for its American founder, Allen Stanford. He and Mr. Stanford came to be extremely close and “were like father and son,” one well-placed source told me.

Mr. Stanford’s name may ring a bell as he was sentenced to prison for 110 years for committing an $8 billion Ponzi scheme. In 2006, the Hugo Chavez government was asked to investigate Mr. Tirado by scandal-plagued, pro-Wall Street New York Congressman Gregory W. Meeks, a member of the House Committee on Financial Services and a major recipient of cash and perks from jailbird Allen Stanford. Mr. Tirado was charged with tax evasion and theft, The Hill newspaper reported.

As I’ll detail below—and I uncovered this story with help from the National Legal and Policy Center, a Virginia-based watchdog group—Tirado soon fled for Miami to avoid prosecution and petitioned the State Department, through Mr. Mantz, for political asylum. It’s not clear if he won asylum—and he doesn’t seem to merit it as he had no record of political opposition to the Chavez government—but it is clear that he was allowed to remain in the U.S. and live a life of luxury.

(Mr. Tirado, who did not reply to a request for comment, has kept a low profile as of late. His last reported sighting came in 2014, when he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide, or at least claimed he intended to kill himself.)

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) announces his endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president.

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) announces his endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president. (Photo Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Incredibly, the Obama administration not only failed to help the Chavez government investigate Mr. Tirado, but it also indicted a legendary former DEA agent named Tom Raffanello, a one-time  head of the DEA’s Miami office and the agency’s chief of congressional affairs during Bill Clinton’s first term as president.

Mr. Raffanello’s  subsequent prosecution, which ended in abysmal failure, almost surely was prompted and abetted by Mr. Tirado, a secret FBI informant. Unsurprisingly, the vindicated Mr. Raffanello had few kind words for Mr. Tirado or Ms. Clinton during a recent interview.

“Tirado believed in buying influence,” Mr. Raffanello said of the crooked financier. “He wouldn’t give away 10 cents that he didn’t think he’d get back a dollar on. That was his entire philosophy.”

As for Ms. Clinton, he said that during her years in the Obama administration the “prevailing wisdom in Miami at the time, among people in high profile civil and criminal defense circles, was that giving money to the Clinton Foundation was very helpful. She was secretary of state and a potential future president. I’m sure that’s the same thinking now.”

(Ms. Clinton’s presidential campaign did not reply to a request for comment.)

Up until 2006, life was cushy for pampered, wealthy, jet-setting Gonzalo Tirado, who was running the Stanford Bank’s Venezuela operations. Events took a turn for the worse when an internal Stanford Bank audit discovered that he had fleeced about $5 million from the company.

Mr. Tirado’s actions did not sit well with Stanford, and the Venezuelan beat a hasty exit from his job. He soon opened a bank of his own and lured in a few local investors. His new enterprise went down the tubes, and the defrauded locals, who were very close to the Chavez government, looked to it for help, leading to an investigation of Mr. Tirado.

Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. (Photo Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images)

At the same time, the Chavez government was investigating Mr. Tirado at the behest of Stanford, through his hand-picked emissary, Congressman Meeks. (See this Wikileaked cable for more on the topic and on Mr. Tirado’s feud with the Venezuelan government.) That led to the filing of criminal charges against Mr. Tirado, as noted above. (The Venezuelan embassy in Washington did not reply to a request for comment.)

Mr. Tirado, apparently a conscienceless paranoid who felt no remorse for his actions, became convinced that Stanford Bank was monitoring his activities and tapping his phone and was the source of all of his troubles. Perhaps sensing he was in deep trouble, he fled Venezuela for Miami.

Mr. Tirado began spending money like a drunken sailor. He purchased at least two luxury estates in the Miami area. He also became a major investor in several companies, including a security firm called Command Consulting Group for which he recruited as a front man W. Ralph Basham, a former senior official with the Department of Homeland Security under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Command Consulting Group, “an international security and intelligence consulting firm that provides advisory services to governments, corporations, and high net worth individuals,” according to its website, and whose top officials include a number of other former senior government terror and security veterans, is currently run out of an office in Washington. (Mr. Basham did not reply to a request for comment.)

As 2009 dawned, life could hardly have been better for the pampered Mr. Tirado. There was just one small problem: He needed to stay in the U.S. to avoid being sent back back to Venezuela, where he was sure to face trial and imprisonment. To stay in the U.S., Mr. Tirado needed the continued indulgence of the U.S. State Department.

Fortunately for Mr. Tirado, the U.S. government had been hostile to Venezuela ever since the South American nation of 31 million moved to the left in 2002, when Chavez was elected to the first of his three terms.

(Note and disclosure: Chavez died in 2013, and the country is now led by his former vice president, Nicolás Maduro. Despite its flaws, the country’s socialist government has made remarkable strides in bettering the lives of Venezuela’s poor majority. In 2004, I met Chavez as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and I consider him to be the greatest force for democratic change in modern Latin American history with the possible exception of Che Guevera.)

The George W. Bush administration had regularly conspired with the rancid political opposition, which Chavez displaced from power, and had sought to destabilize and overthrow the Chavez government with the help of local Venezuelan surrogates. Incoming President Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, were rabid opponents of Chavez’s as well, but Mr. Tirado didn’t want to count on that alone.

Jonathan Mantz.

Jonathan Mantz. (BGR Group)

Knowing how the corrupt U.S. political system works, he hired an American lobbyist, Jonathan Mantz, to game the asylum process for him while he took it easy and spent his loot in America.

Mantz then worked at BGR, the firm of Republican Haley Barbour, the famously overweight former Mississippi governor and one of the most prominent of all GOP lobby shops. He had previously worked as finance director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and for the laughably corrupt New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.

Mr. Mantz, who had no real qualifications to be a lobbyist other than his ability to raise money—and who did not reply to a request for comment—had drummed up cash for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Currently Mr. Mantz chairs Hillary’s 2016 Super PAC, Priorities USA Action. Mr. Tirado paid BGR $350,000.

Now sufficiently motivated, Mantz went to work lobbying Hillary’s State Department to let Tirado stay in Miami. Meanwhile, the crooked Mr. Tirado donated between $5,000 and $10,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to its website. As is its custom, the foundation does not state when the donation was made and declined to answer questions about the money it took from Mr. Tirado.

Coincidentally or not, Mr. Tirado was one four of Mr. Mantz’ clients who donated to the Clinton Foundation during his brief 16-month career as a lobbyist.

Thomas Raffanealo.

Thomas Raffanello. (LinkedIn Profile)

Now let’s discuss the story of former DEA agent Thomas Raffanello, at which point this story becomes even more outrageous.

Mr. Raffanello worked for the DEA for more than three decades. He left in 2004 and went to work as the head of security for the Stanford Bank. “We set up cameras to prevent bank robberies and generally provided security at bank offices and functions,” Mr. Raffanello told me last weekend during the course of several lengthy phone interviews. “I was based in Miami but had offices in Caracas, Quito, Antigua and a few other places.”

Mr. Raffanello said Allen Stanford “couldn’t balance a checkbook” and described him as “a spoiled billionaire.” When I asked him why he went to work for Stanford in the first place he said, “I did due diligence. I called several associates, including the former head of DEA in Miami before me and several former assistant U.S. attorneys who worked for him. No one ever gave me a bad word; they said he was eccentric but a straight shooter. Madeleine Albright worked for him, and the former president of Switzerland was one of his board members.”

Stanford Bank collapsed and was put into receivership in 2010, at which point Mr. Raffanello left the company. But well before then Mr. Tirado—who, a source told me, had become an FBI informant—had become convinced that Mr. Raffanello was the source for all of his problems with the Chavez government and its investigation into him. Hence, he began a smear campaign against Mr. Raffanello in Venezuela and the United States.

As I mentioned above, it was Congressman Meeks—who currently supports Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and who took in more money from Stanford than any single member of Congress other than Charles Rangel and Pete Sessions of Texas—who prompted the Chavez government to look into Mr. Tirado.

But the paranoid Mr. Tirado, certain Mr. Raffanello was to blame, paid Venezuelan writers to place stories saying Mr. Raffanello worked for the CIA, Mr. Raffanello told me. That led to the Chavez government questioning Mr. Raffanello for alleged corruption involving the Stanford bank, though it determined the allegations were groundless and never charged him.

“Venezuela is like Casablanca,” Mr. Raffanello said. “If you tell a story twice it becomes the truth. It became impossible for me to go to Venezuela because I feared I’d get picked up by law enforcement.”

“I thought I was going to get Shanghaied, but you can’t make something out of nothing.” — Thomas Raffanello.

Meanwhile, Mr. Raffanello said, Mr. Tirado told the FBI and the Justice Department that he was trying to arrange Mr. Tirado’s kidnapping and was spying on him. “The guy knows how to play the game, and he played it at a high level because he had plenty of money,” Mr. Raffanello said.

About a year after Mr. Raffanello left Stanford Bank, he was indicted by the Obama Justice Department for allegedly shredding Stanford Bank documents. The case went to trial in Miami in 2010. On February 10 of that year, as the jury was deliberating, Judge Richard Goldberg interrupted its deliberations and unilaterally acquitted Raffanello (and another defendant), saying the evidence against him was “substantially lacking.”

It is highly unusual for a person to escape conviction after being indicted by a federal grand jury, let alone for the government to be humiliated in court as it was in the Raffanello case. Stunned federal prosecutors begged the judge to at least allow the jury to render a verdict because the acquittal would prevent them from appealing a verdict.

The judge dismissed their plea, and Mr. Raffanello’s ordeal was over. “I thought I was going to get Shanghaied, but you can’t make something out of nothing,” he said.

To sum up here, a corrupt Venezuelan banker hired a lobbyist close to Hillary Clinton, made a donation to her family’s foundation and has been allowed to live in the United States without fear of prosecution in his homeland. At a time that Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, the Obama Administration staged what can only be described as a political prosecution of an honest man and long-time government employee.

Mr. Raffanello has concluded this about Hillary Clinton’s campaign: “I learned a lot about her and her family when I was in the government, and how they are put together,” he said. “She is a person who will say and do anything in order to get elected president. I don’t think she’s going to win, but there’s nothing she won’t do while trying.”