The Benghazi Attack Is Finally Being Properly Prosecuted

On the night of June 15, 2014, eight Americans—six Delta Force operators, an F.B.I. agent, and an Arabic translator—travelled in rubber boats across the Mediterranean and arrived on a beach in Benghazi, Libya. They hustled across the sand and snuck into a nearby safe house. Their plan was to lure and capture Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the alleged ringleader of the most politicized terrorist attack since 9/11.

Twenty-one months earlier, on September 11, 2012, Khatallah had, according to federal prosecutors, coördinated the assault on the American Consulate in Benghazi. Two State Department officials, including the U.S. Ambassador, Christopher Stevens, died in that attack, and two C.I.A. contractors were killed in a subsequent firefight at a nearby C.I.A. facility.

A day after the eight-man team beached on the coast, one of Khatallah’s associates unwittingly led Khatallah to the safe house. As soon as Khatallah stepped into the dark villa, several soldiers pounced on him. He tried to kick, punch, and bite his way free, without success. The F.B.I. agent present—who has been identified in court by only a surname, “Johnson”—brought Khatallah into a bathroom, where he covered the suspect’s eyes, plugged his ears, and stuffed a bit into his mouth. The team then hustled Khatallah across the beach, boarded its boats, and raced toward the U.S.S. New York, a twenty-five-thousand-ton* amphibious transport dock made, in part, with steel recovered from the World Trade Center towers, and waiting offshore.

The Benghazi attack has been thoroughly scrutinized. The Republican-led House of Representatives spent millions of dollars and held hearing after hearing on the matter during President Barack Obama’s second term. But the lawmakers leading the hearings seemed more focussed on Hillary Clinton and her colleagues—trying to find any missteps they made before, during, or after the attack that could be used for political purposes—than on the alleged perpetrators of the violence itself.

Meanwhile, the hunt for Khatallah was being pursued by operators and analysts from the C.I.A., Joint Special Operations Command, and the F.B.I. One of the biggest questions for them was what to do with Khatallah once they found him. Counterterrorism officials considered a drone strike or a lethal raid, a former military official told me, but President Obama and the Justice Department wanted to capture him alive and bring him to the United States to stand trial.

This was not a straightforward task. American officials did not have sufficient confidence in the Libyan police to coördinate with them for Khatallah’s arrest. And the F.B.I. wasn’t in a position to pursue Khatallah on its own. Moreover, the intelligence on Khatallah suggested that he could prove difficult to capture—he supposedly carried around a grenade like an explosive cyanide pill.

Officials hatched a hybrid plan: F.B.I. agents would accompany one of the military’s élite manhunting units on the mission for Khatallah. The agents would be present throughout the operation to preserve evidence, so that they, as law-enforcement officials, could later testify in civilian court.

This was a fairly radical concept. Plenty of terrorists had been indicted and tried in American civilian courts, but Khatallah would be the first known case of someone captured through a military mission, Mirandized by law-enforcement officials, and then tried in open court, before a jury. John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, was captured by military and intelligence officers in Afghanistan and charged in civilian court, but he pleaded guilty before going to trial. More typically, terrorists targeted during military raids have been either killed; detained in U.S.-run military prisons, such as Abu Ghraib; handed over, in the case of Iraq or Afghanistan, to local police or intelligence agencies; or, in the years immediately after 9/11, sent to Guantánamo Bay. Osama bin Laden was indicted by a federal court in 1998, three years before the September 11th attacks. But when American Navy seals finally confronted him in Pakistan, in 2011, they shot and killed him.

Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have been vocal critics of trying terrorists in civilian courtrooms. Trump described Obama’s stated desire to close Guantánamo as a “terrible decision,” and Sessions has called the military tribunals at Guantánamo the “perfect place” for terrorism trials.

After his capture, Khatallah was interrogated first by military and intelligence officials. Then, after five days, a “clean team” of law-enforcement officials took over. Michael Clarke, an F.B.I. agent, read Khatallah his Miranda rights and told him that he was entitled to an attorney. Khatallah asked if there was a lawyer on board. There was not.

Speaking through a translator, Khatallah gave Clarke a lengthy statement over the course of the thirteen-day trip across the Atlantic Ocean. In D.C. district court, Khatallah’s current attorney, Eric L. Lewis, has argued that his client’s “slow boat” extradition was unnecessarily drawn out. “The capture of Mr. Abu Khatallah was a spectacular logistical operation . . . [but] a legal failure,” Lewis said at a June hearing. He wanted Khatallah’s statement thrown out. The judge, Christopher Cooper, ruled against him.

Yet Cooper has set some limits to the proceedings. In the run-up to Khatallah’s trial, which is scheduled to begin on Monday, the judge decided that prosecutors would be unable to admit evidence purporting that Khatallah once told an associate that he was intending to kill Stevens’s replacement, too. Allowing such evidence, Cooper said, would heighten “prejudicial risk” and “do little to illuminate the formation and contours” of the actual 2012 attack. It seems, at long last, that someone is intent on paying attention to what actually occurred in Benghazi.

Source

I may disagree with Sessions on marijuana but we are on the same page here. The terrorists need to be held at Gitmo not in American jails.

CISPA is back only know it is known as CISA

From Fight For The Future:

CISA: the dirty deal between government and corporate giants.

It's the dirty deal that lets much of government from the NSA to local police get your private data from your favorite websites and lets them use it without due process.

The government is proposing a massive bribe—they will give corporations immunity for breaking virtually any law if they do so while providing the NSA, DHS, DEA, and local police surveillance access to everyone's data in exchange for getting away with crimes, like fraud, money laundering, or illegal wiretapping.

Specifically it incentivizes companies to automatically and simultaneously transfer your data to the DHS, NSA, FBI, and local police with all of your personally-indentifying information by giving companies legal immunity (notwithstanding any law), and on top of that, you can't use the Freedom of Information Act to find out what has been shared.

The NSA and members of Congress want to pass a "cybersecurity" bill so badly, they’re using the recent hack of the Office of Personnel Management as justification for bringing CISA back up and rushing it through. In reality, the OPM hack just shows that the government has not been a good steward of sensitive data and they need to institute real security measures to fix their problems. The truth is that CISA could not have prevented
the OPM hack, and no Senator could explain how it could have. Congress and the NSA are using irrational hysteria to turn the Internet into a place where the government has overly broad, unchecked powers.

Why Faxes?

Since 2012, online and civil liberties groups and 30,000+ sites have driven more than 2.6 million emails and hundreds of thousands of calls, tweets and more to Congress opposing overly broad cybersecurity legislation. Congress has tried to pass CISA in one form or another 4 times, and they were beat back every time by people like you. It's clear Congress is completely out of touch with modern technology, so this week, as Congress rushes toward a vote on CISA, we are going to send them thousands of faxes, a technology from the 1980s that is hopefully antiquated enough for them to understand.

Sending a fax is super easy — you can use this page to send a fax. Any tweet with the hashtag #faxbigbrother will get turned into a fax to Congress too, so what are you waiting for? Click here

Sourceclick here

Preserve the Fourth Amendment

From RandPAC:

I stood on the Senate floor for almost 13 hours filibustering John Brennan's nomination to be Director of the CIA.

And I also voted against his confirmation.

In light of the disturbing new revelations that John Brennan didn't tell the truth when he stated that the CIA never spied on the Senate, it's time for heads to roll.

You see, a new inspector general's report details how the CIA snooped around the computers of Senate staffers in a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.

It’s illegal for the CIA to spy on Americans.

Director Brennan should dismiss those who broke the law and he should be relieved of his post.

But Congress should not rest until the Fourth Amendment is defended just as fiercely as the First or Second Amendment.

President Obama's administration has a sorry history of treating our rights -- against unreasonable search and seizure -- as a doormat.

Last year we learned about the NSA's warrantless spying program that mined through our phone calls and emails.

And now we learn the CIA trained its "watchful eye" on the Senate.

The Obama administration has flown off the hinges in their blatant disregard for basic Constitutional protections.

But holding John Brennan accountable for an administration that wipes their feet all over the Fourth Amendment isn't enough.

That's why I hope you'll stand with me in this fight by signing your "Fourth Amendment Protection Act" petition right away.

This bill will prevent the government from sifting through the emails of American citizens and require them to obtain a warrant before searching the data of specific terrorist suspects.

America needs a Congress that will defend the bill of rights.

Help RANDPAC elect constitutional conservatives this November who will fight to restore the rule of law by adding your voice today.

In Liberty,

Senator Rand Paul (R - KY)

P.S. CIA Director John Brennan failed to tell the truth when he claimed the CIA wasn't spying on the Senate.

It's time for him to be relieved of his post.

But holding Director Brennan accountable won't restore our Fourth Amendment rights.

Please sign your "Fourth Amendment Protection Act" petition and help RANDPAC elect constitutional conservatives this November who will defend the rule of law.

Interview with Kim Jung Un

Seth Rogen and James Franco are trying to kill me. I want police protection
North Korea on Wednesday denounced a new Hollywood comedy about an assassination bid on leader Kim Jong-Un as a "wanton act of terror" and warned of a "merciless response" unless the US authorities banned the film.

"The Interview" stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as two celebrity journalists who land an interview with Kim and are then tasked by the CIA with killing him.

The film is due to be released in the United States on October 14.

In a statement carried by North Korea's official KCNA news agency, a foreign ministry spokesman said the film was the work of "gangster moviemakers" and should never be shown.

"The act of making and screening such a movie that portrays the attack on our top leadership... is a most wanton act of terror and act of war, and is absolutely intolerable," the spokesman said.

In his statement, he called on the US administration to ban the film from being screened and warned that failure to do so would trigger a "resolute and merciless response".

It is not the first time Hollywood has poked fun at a North Korean leader.

In the 2004 satirical action comedy "Team America," Kim's father Kim Jong-Il was portrayed as a speech-impaired, isolated despot.

Source

I thought this was fucking funny. Journalists can usually find these terrorists easier than the military can so why not have Green Berets among the journalists to do the job to save the United States.

CIA mind control

I can relate to what they are talking about especially the ground shaking. Yes it did happen to me. I know how it sounds but that is the truth.