Barry Rubin writes convincingly – and very depressingly – about the pathetic Benghazi cover-up (see our post immediately below, Covering up The Big Secret):

It was well-known that in 2011 the United States was facilitating the weapons supply to Syrian rebels. The weapons were paid for by Qatar and Saudi Arabia and delivered through Turkey.

We have known for more than a year of this traffic. There were two big UN Reports on this traffic.( By the way this meant that the United States was arming Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups.)

What wasn’t known was a simple detail: the United States was also collecting and shipping the weapons.

That’s it! This is what was being concealed. After all, it was openly known previously that the Libyan rebels against Qadhafi were armed by the United States.

The whole mess was unnecessary!

If it was known that the CIA guys in Turkey weren’t just watching the weapons supply but delivering it, to quote Clinton, what difference would it make?

Would Congress have stopped the weapons’ traffic? No, they wouldn’t even do anything about the arms to Mexican drug gangs that killed Americans.

Would Americans rise in revolt? No.

Would it have cost one percent of the votes in the election? No.

Sure, some bloggers would have talked about parallels to Iran-Contra and a handful of members of Congress would have complained but the massive media machine would have ignored it and the majority of Republicans would have snored.

Did President Obama have to lie in a UN speech saying the ambassador was just there to supervise a hospital and a school? No.

Did a video have to be blamed so as to blame Americans and Islamophobia for the attack? No.

Was the cover-up necessary even to defend the administration’s “perfect record against terrorist attacks on Americans”? No.

The exposé of this arms’ supply channel would have bothered few and changed nothing.

But since we knew already that the administration was helping arm anti-American, antisemitic, anti-Christian, and homophobic, and anti-women Islamist terrorists I don’t think the difference was huge.

Did the cover-up have to lead to the refusal to defend properly American personnel to prevent what they were doing from leaking out? No.

In short this program of lies and deception and cover up wasn’t even necessary. Those Americans may have been rescued and those lies might have been avoided with no harm to the administration.

I think that tells a lot about how the Obama Administration treats and manipulates the American people. And it also tells about its very profound incompetence and ignorance.

While it is a bleak thought that the mass media would have ignored the truth, that only “a handful of members of Congress would have complained”, and “the majority of Republicans would have snored”, we believe Barry Rubin is right.

Roger L. Simon agrees. He comments at PJ Media:

For nearly a year, we have had no answer to why the administration lied about Benghazi — why it told the world, not to mention the parents of our murdered SEALs at the funeral of their sons, that the cause of that fatal conflagration was an anti-Islamic video no one saw, when the various arms of our executive branch (White House, State and intelligence) already knew, or strongly suspected, it was a terror attack orchestrated by al-Qaeda affiliates.

You only have to read the now infamous talking points to know that.

That this lie was deeply immoral is obvious. What still eludes us is the cause of that lie, other than the equally obvious desire to avoid embarrassment weeks before a presidential election.

But what was this embarrassment about? Recent events have supposedly unearthed a tie to secret arms shipments to Syrian rebels, but as the always cogent Barry Rubin points out, anyone paying attention to the story has known this for some time. Rumors of such shipments filled the Internet even before the Benghazi fireworks.

Furthermore, as Rubin also indicates, if that information had been immediately revealed or leaked to the public soon after the event, it would have been met by a national shoulder shrug that was firmly ratified by Obama’s loyal media claque. It wouldn’t have impacted the election much, if at all.

So is there another, more important fact that the Obama regime is covering up? Another fact that makes it so uneasy that it lies, red-faced, to America?

Roger Simon pulls it out into the daylight:

No, something more problematic was involved and I suspect I know what it was.

No one wanted to admit — or probably face for themselves — the extent to which the president, and therefore his administration, the State Department, the CIA and even the military, was in bed with Islamists.

And still is. And more and more “Islamists” are creeping into that rank and fetid bed.

That the Benghazi consulate (or whatever it was) was guarded by al-Qaeda types who surely either turned on the people they were supposed to be defending that night, or simply gave safe passage to the enemy, is only tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Like many icebergs this one has different sections and ridges. An important one was that the death of bin Laden meant the death or diminution of al-Qaeda, as Obama continually bragged during the election campaign.

Nothing could be more absurd, if you think about it, and not just because al-Qaeda is once more at the top of the news, closing down dozens of embassies before a shot is fired, but because bin Laden was just one (okay, dramatic) ripple in the Islamist story.

And he quotes the cry of “the Arab street”: “Obama, Obama, we are all Osama!”

… Obama — and therefore the administration, State Department, intelligence and military — threw in to a greater or lesser extent with the Brotherhood and their Islamist colleagues. They did this despite the Brotherhood’s obvious extreme misogyny and homophobia, which, under normal circumstances, we would assume to be anathema to so-called “progressives.”

Leaving aside that mind-boggling inconsistency, Islamists also see democracy, when they decide to engage in it, as a temporary tool for jihadist ends. (Obama’s putative buddy Turkey’s Erdogan famously said, “democracy is like a train. You take it where you have to go, and then you get off.”)

Lately, Obama has incurred the ire — with some justification, I think — of new Egyptian military strongman al-Sisi  for going against the wishes of the Egyptian people in favor of a kind of desperate nostalgia for Morsi and the Brotherhood. (Forget the rapes and the rest of it.)

So what accounts for Obama’s weird attraction for this “Muslim revivalism,” despite all its Medieval tenets and near-psychotic behaviors? …

Like so many schooled in post-modernism and cultural relativism, he has an immediate and intense enmity for anything that smacks of imperialism — and an equally intense desire to be seen as supportive of (although certainly not to live like) the downtrodden of the Earth.

Because it makes them feel good. It is the moral hubris of the Left. It is the moral narcissism of the Left intelligentsia. 

Which leads us back to Benghazi. You don’t have to be Muslim to love the Muslim Brotherhood or even, consciously or unconsciously, sympathize with the goals, if not the actions, of al-Qaeda. You just have to have been imbued with a blind hatred of imperialism. That’s all you need.

Yes – but we would have written it as “imperialism”.

What this myopia leads to, however, is consorting with people with no values at all. You get in bed with the worst of the worst. …

What the administration doesn’t want, of all things, is for these dots to be connected via Benghazi.

No wonder the culprits have not been arrested. They might talk!

The one thing the disgraceful story reveals that is not depressing, that could be taken as a sign for optimism, is this:

For Obama and his minions to go to such lengths to cover up up their cultivation of the intensely evil Muslim Brotherhood, because their Leftism trumps everything, they must – as both these commenters indicate – be very deeply ashamed.

In their shame lies freedom’s hope.

It emerges that there were dozens of CIA operatives working at the annex of the US Benghazi mission; dozens who may have witnessed what happened there that night; dozens who could tell the Americans who pay them just what the CIA was doing there. But Obama’s people are so determined that The Big Secret should not be divulged that those dozens are  being frequently tested with polygraphs.(Echoes from the Lubyanka torture prison of the KGB: “Have you told?” “No.” “Ah-hah,caught you – you’re lying! Off to Siberia with you.”)

And that is not all …

This video of Rep. Trey Gowdy talking to Greta Van Susteren on Fox News comes via Breitbart, where this useful text is also provided.

The highlight comes at 2:20 when both Van Susteren and Gowdy claim that people who survived the attack are being dispersed around the county and having their names changed:

Van Susteren: I’d love to interview the survivors but the administration is doing everything it can to hide them. They are dispersing them around the country. And of course the CNN report shows that even CIA operatives who were there are getting intimidated from above.

Rep. Gowdy: Including changing names, creating aliases. So you stop and think what things are most calculated to get at the truth–talk to people with first hand knowledge. What creates the appearance or perhaps the reality of a coverup? Not letting us talk to people who have the most amount of information, dispersing them throughout the country and changing their names.

Needless to say, you don’t change people’s names for a phony scandal. If this can be substantiated it is clear evidence of a cover up.

Caroline Glick comments on the ludicrous – no, lunatic resurrection of a long dead and always pointless “peace process”, a masquerade which involves nothing more than deranged Israeli politicians, American under-informed egos, and racist Palestinians with no mandate from anybody saying yet again everything that’s been said a hundred thousand times before.

As always, Israel is “pressured” by powers and the spirits of darkness to “make concessions” – which it always does – while no pressure is brought to bear on the Palestinians to concede anything at all.

The Arabs will concede nothing ever. They want the abolition of the state of Israel nothing less. If they were to accept sovereignty over Judea and Samaria it would be as an interim measure, a stage towards their final goal of taking over the whole region –  a “stages policy” having been approved by Yasser Arafat.

What the present powers and spirits of darkness (going this time under the names of “Barack Obama” and “John Kerry”) are trying to achieve is the abolition of the state of Israel. They can bring this about by forcing Israel to shrink very small and into that remnant squeeze a few million Palestinian “refugees”. The Palestinian leaders, openly racist and with an apartheid mentality, say they will not tolerate a single Jew on their territory, and will combine what is at present Israel, plus Samaria and Judea (the ancient land of the Judeans or Israelites), and Gaza to constitute a new state named Palestine. It will be the first time such a state has ever existed. Then the Jews, expelled from the little state they let go to please “Barack Obama” and “John Kerry”, will once again be stateless and at the mercy of host nations who practice their God-enjoined neighborly love of them with periodic pogroms and genocidal massacres. “Barack Obama” and “John Kerry” will be no more pleased with them then than they are now or ever have been. One can only conclude that if Israeli leaders really do let this happen, they are either severely mentally retarded or incurably insane.

Caroline Glick looks far down the road-map and sees with brilliant clarity the insanity of the present talks. She writes (in part):

Kerry visited Israel six times in the four months leading up to the meetings in Washington this week, during which Americans, Palestinians and Israelis discussed the size of the table they will be sitting around in the coming discussions.

During the same four months, the Syrian regime used chemical weapons against its opponents on multiple occasions. Most recently, they gassed Palestinians in Yarmuk refugee camp outside Damascus, killing 22 people.

During those four months, al-Qaida strengthened its control over the Syrian opposition groups fighting the regime.

During those four months, the Syrian civil war became a focal point of a wider Sunni-Shi’ite religious war that has already spread to Lebanon and Iraq. In its post-US-withdrawal role of Iranian satrapy, Iraq has allowed Iran to use its territory and airspace to transfer war materiel to the Syrian regime.

During those four months, the Obama administration decided to begin arming the al-Qaida dominated rebel forces. It has also deliberately raised the risk of a Syrian-Israeli war by informing the media every time that Israel attacks missile sites in Syria.

Also during the four months that Kerry obsessed over convincing PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas to send his representative to Washington, Egypt experienced its second revolution in which, buffeted by millions of demonstrators who filled the squares of Egypt’s cities, the Egyptian military overthrew the US-supported Muslim Brotherhood regime. …

This week … a deeply disturbing report … explained that … Iran will reach “critical capacity” in its nuclear program by mid-2014 … [defining] critical capacity as “the technical capability to produce sufficient weapon-grade uranium from its safeguarded stocks of low enriched uranium for a nuclear explosive, without being detected.”  …

But for Kerry …  the most urgent priority was to convince the Palestinians to sit in the same room as Israelis. …

Which he did, after the Palestinians had insisted that 104 terrorists imprisoned in Israel be released. Kerry pressured Israel to release them, and Israel did.

Its a dance. The steps are prescribed. They are followed in strict order.

The 104 “prisoners” are made up of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. They are not car thieves or pickpockets. They are monsters with human faces. All 104 are serving life sentences for murder or attempted murder. Their crimes were gruesome acts of barbarism marked by demonic cruelty. …

There was nothing even vaguely courageous about Netanyahu’s decision to release these monsters.

There was nothing even vaguely courageous about his cabinet members’ decision to vote for their release. Theirs was an act of utter cravenness. They dishonored the victims, the victims’ families and the nation as a whole.

And they endangered the country. According to the Almagor Victims of Terror organization, from 2000 to 2005, 180 Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorists released by Israel in previous “deals.” And those terrorists had been imprisoned for non-lethal actions, (i.e., without blood on their hands).

The fact that Netanyahu and his ministers passed this decision simply to provide a sufficient payoff to Abbas for him to send Saeb Erekat to Washington to talk about nothing with (Israel’s leftist Minister of Justice) Livni, makes their actions, not only craven, but insane. …

Kerry said that the talks about the size of the table are going to bring about a situation where Israel will achieve, “not just the absence of conflict, but a full and lasting peace with the Arab and Muslim nations.”

Like Kerry’s demand that Israel free the terrorists, this statement bespeaks an underlying fanatical dementia. …

Because the “Arab and Muslim nations” have given not the least sign, not the faintest hint, that they would make peace with Israel in any circumstances whatsoever.  

As for the Palestinians, if they were interested in “lasting peace” with Israel, they wouldn’t demand freedom for terrorist murderers. Moreover, while Kerry was exulting in his brilliant success, Abbas announced that in his version of “lasting peace,” Jews will be wiped off of the map of Palestine.

As Abbas put it, “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldiers – on our lands.” …

It is not surprising that Kerry, Obama and Livni are going along with this obscenity. It is not surprising that fanatics who pray to the god of the two-state solution think it is courageous to free Jewish-baby killers. It is not surprising they think the most important thing on the international agenda is to secure Israel’s surrender of land, our legal rights, and our ability to defend ourselves to a terrorist group that hates Jews so much it requires all of us to be gone before it will do us the favor of accepting sovereignty.

What is surprising – and frightening – is that Netanyahu … is going along with this.

Netanyahu knows that Israel cannot survive without Judea and Samaria. He knows what the Muslim Brotherhood is. He knows the nature of the Iranian regime. He knows that the PLO is no different from Hamas. Their goal is the same – they want to destroy Israel.

Netanyahu knows that Obama is hostile to Israel and that he will not lift a finger to block Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

So why is he going along with their insanity? In bowing to US pressure and approving the release of 104 terrorist murderers from prison, Netanyahu behaved like a coward. In bowing to US pressure not to bomb Iran’s nuclear installations, Netanyahu is being a coward.

The most important question for Israel today then is whether our leader is capable of being anything else.

*

And there is this depressingly accurate commentary on the “peace talks” by Avi Bell, Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, posted at The Augean Stables:

If Israel refuses to negotiate, that proves Israel is not interested in peace, because it refuses to negotiate.

If the Palestinians refuse to negotiate, that proves Israel is not interested in peace, because the Palestinians can see negotiations with Israel are pointless.

If Israel makes preconditions to negotiations, that proves Israel is not interested in peace, because it is trying to avoid negotiations.

If the Palestinians make preconditions to negotiations, that proves Israel is not interested in peace, because the Palestinians have to force Israel to be serious in the negotiations.

If Israel makes no offer of peace, that proves Israel is not interested in peace.

If the Palestinians make no offer of peace, that proves Israel is not interested in peace, because the Palestinians can see that making offers of peace with Israel are pointless.

If Israel makes an offer of peace and the Palestinians reject it, that proves Israel is not interested in peace, because Israel is not willing to make the kind of offer the Palestinians would accept.

 The United States is not so poor that it actually needs to recycle. It recycles not under the impulse of economic imperatives, but of government mandates.

These passages are taken from an article by Daniel Greenfield:

Environmentalism, like every liberal notion, is sold to the masses as modern and progressive. It’s the exact opposite. …

Prince Charles, that avid idiot and environmentalist, visited a Mumbai slum a few years ago and said that it had some lessons to teach the West.

“When you enter what looks from the outside like an immense mound of plastic and rubbish, you immediately come upon an intricate network of streets with miniature shops, houses and workshops, each one made out of any material that comes to hand,” Prince Charles wrote in his book, Harmony.

The Prince of Wales is quite the author. In addition to Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, he has written Shelter: Human Habitats from Around the World, The Prince’s Speech: On the Future of Food and The Illustrated Guide to Chickens: How to Choose Them, How to Keep Them.

One might be forgiven for assuming that the royal brain twitching behind those watery eyes is preparing for some sort of apocalypse. And it is. The apocalypse is environmentalism. Or from the point of view of the environmentalists, who spare some time from their public appearances and their mansions to pen tomes on the future of food and how to choose chickens, the apocalypse is prosperity. 

People of that sort think that instead of getting the slum dwellers of Mumbai into apartments, we ought to be figuring out how to build shelters out of random garbage. Think of it as the recycling can solution as applied to your entire life.

That is the sort of lifestyle that environmentalists think of as sustainable. …

More recently another deep thinker, Peter Buffett, [multi-billionaire] Warren Buffett’s son, took to the editorial pages of the New York Times to denounce Third World philanthropy.

Just a note in the margin: We ourselves are not very keen on philanthropy (though we very much like private personal generosity), because it seldom if ever makes any real difference to those it is bestowed upon, its chief effect being to make the philanthropist feel good. But the point here is more important. It is that these people, Charles and Peter, are so fabulously wealthy they can afford to despise wealth. They pleasure themselves with silly ignorant musings on how it is morally superior, more beautiful, to be poor.

“Microlending and financial literacy — what is this really about?” Buffett asks [in his NYT op-ed]. “People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?”

To the slum dwellers, the beast isn’t capitalism, it’s that gnawing feeling in your stomach when you haven’t eaten for a day. But Peter Buffett, who lives a life almost as privileged as Prince Charles, bemoans the idea of getting people to the point where they aren’t worried about where their next meal is coming from because it just turns them into capitalists and consumers. …

Instead of helping the Third World live like us, the perverse children of the rich dream of making us live like the Third World. …

Recycling is big business because the government and its affiliated liberal elites decided it should be. It’s just one example of an artificial economy and it’s small stuff compared to the coming carbon crackdown in which every human activity will be monetized and taxed somewhere down the road according to its carbon footprint.

The ultimate dream of the sort of people who can’t sleep at night because they worry that children in India might be able to grow up making more than two dollars a day, is to take away our prosperity for our own good through the total regulation of every area of our lives under the pretext of an imminent environmental crisis.

The Global Warming hysteria is about absolute power [in the hands of a self-appointed elite] over every man, woman and child on earth.

Environmentalism is wealth redistribution on a global scale. The goal isn’t even to lift all boats, but to stop the tide of materialism from making too many people too comfortable.

The liberal billionaire who clamors about sustainability … dislikes the middle class …

As princes and aristocrats always have …

… with its mass produced cars and homes, cheap restaurants full of fatty foods, and television sets and daily deliveries of cardboard boxes full of stuff, and shopping malls. He thinks, in all sincerity, that they would be happier and more spiritually fulfilled as peasants.

Beneath all the empty chatter about social riches[!] and sustainability is that need to impose progressive misery.

Beneath the glossy surface of environmentalism is a vision of the American middle class learning to dig through bags of garbage, the detritus of their consumerism for which they must be punished, to become better people.