Benghazi is only part of the story of Hillary Clinton’s depredations in Libya. Now that she’s been coronated by both parties (see “The Fix Is In,” SLL, 10/21/15), here’s a knowledgeable account of those depredations before they disappear down the memory hole, which they will. From Andrew Napolitano at antiwar.com:
The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd captured the moment last weekend when she referred to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as “the midwife to chaos” in Libya. Dowd apparently came to that conclusion after watching Clinton bobbing and weaving and admitting and denying as she was confronted with the partial record of her failures and obfuscations as secretary of state, particularly with respect to Libya.
The public record is fairly well-known. In March 2011, President Barack Obama declared war on Libya. He did this at the urging of Clinton, who wanted to overthrow Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi so she could boast of having brought “democracy” to the region.
She and Obama conspired to do this even though former President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had publicly praised Gadhafi as an ally in the war against terrorist groups and even though the U.S. was giving the Gadhafi government more than $100 million a year in foreign aid.
Obama did his best to avoid constitutional norms. He deployed American intelligence agents on the ground, not troops, so he could plausibly deny he had put “boots” on the ground. He did not seek an American national consensus for war because Libya presented no threat whatsoever to the U.S. He did not obtain a congressional declaration of war as the Constitution requires because he couldn’t get one. And he did not seek United Nations permission, which is required to attack a fellow U.N. member.
He did obtain a U.N. embargo of the shipment of weapons into Libya, and he secured a NATO-enforced no-fly zone over portions of Libya. In order to enforce the no-fly zone, NATO sent jet fighters over the skies of Libya. The jets were guided and directed by American intelligence agents on the ground to bomb Libyan planes on the ground, which had been paid for by American taxpayers.
To pursue her goal of a “democratic” government there, Clinton, along with Obama and a dozen or so members of Congress from both houses and both political parties, decided she should break the law by permitting U.S. arms dealers to violate the U.N. arms embargo and arm Libyan rebels whom she hoped would one day run the new government. So she exercised her authority as secretary of state to authorize the shipment of American-made arms to Qatar, a country beholden to the Muslim Brotherhood and friendly to the Libyan rebels and a country the U.S. had no business arming – unless the purpose of doing so was for the arms to be transferred to the rebels.
Once this plot was hatched, Clinton and her fellow conspirators realized that some of these rebel groups were manned by al-Qaida operatives; and selling or providing arms to them is a felony – hence the reason for months’ worth of missing and destroyed Clinton emails. How could someone running for president possibly justify providing material assistance to terrorist organizations in the present international climate?
To continue reading: The Midwife to Chaos and her Perjury
