| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
Egyptians on US Policy: Obama, Clinton and Patterson supported terrorism in Egypt. Memo to Benghazi Select Committee
The second House Benghazi Select Committee hearing took place last month. In one notable exchange between Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr, Gowdy asked for the name of the person the Committee needed to speak with to find out what the policy objectives were in Libya. “How can we judge whether or not a policy has failed or succeeded if nobody tells us what the policy objectives were? Who should we bring in to explain why were we in Libya?” Gowdy asked.
As previously reported, documents confirm “we” were in Benghazi because of MANPADs—Man Portable Air Defense Systems also known as shoulder-fired-anti-aircraft missiles and arms trafficking. Weapons that were being “collected” in Libya were being moved into Syria.
Starr, who was not serving in Hillary Clinton’s State Department during the Benghazi attack, directed Gowdy to the Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) and the Near East Asia Bureau to talk about the policy ojectives. Finally, he provided a name: Anne Patterson, the Assistant Secretary of NEA.
Patterson was the US ambassador to Egypt during the Benghazi attacks.
America’s Arab Spring Policy
Let’s answer Chairman Gowdy’s Libya policy objectives question. Unlike what became the violent and deadly 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, where pleas for US help from Iranians were ignored after they challenged the re-election of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Mullah theocracy, the Obama administration’s Arab Spring policy was to support the overthrow of regimes in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and Syria.
As President Barack Obama said at the United Nations in 2012, “It has been less than two years since a vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire to protest the oppressive corruption in his country, and sparked what became known as the Arab Spring. And since then, the world has been captivated by the transformation that’s taken place, and the United States has supported the forces of change.”
That support for “the forces of change” translated to America providing concrete backing to opposition forces, also known as “rebels.” Many of the rebels were terrorists and other assorted Islamic extremists. As the New York Times reported in 2012, “The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.”
