Obama’s favorite JV team has chemical weapon and a new home in which to grow, courtesy of Hillary Clinton. In testimony before the Armed Serves Committee DNI James Clapper confirmed that ISIS has produced and used chemical weapons.
The nation’s top intelligence official confirmed Tuesday that the Islamic State has succeeded in making and deploying chemical agents in Iraq and Syria — calling it the first such attack by an extremist group in more than two decades.
The confirmation of mustard gas use came during Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he spoke to the Islamic State’s growing sophistication online and in the battlefield.
He did not elaborate on where and when the chemical attacks occurred, though there has been mounting evidence the terror group was experimenting with chemical weapons.
“[The Syrian government] has used chemicals against the opposition on multiple occasions since Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Convention. ISIL has also used toxic chemicals in Iraq and Syria, including the blister agent Sulfur mustard,” Clapper said.
He said this marks the first time an extremist group has produced and used a “chemical warfare agent in an attack since Aum Shinrikyo used sarin in Japan in 1995,” referring to the Tokyo subway terror attack that year.
ISIS has new fertile ground and has as many as 5,000 fighters in Libya:
The self-described Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has long been making a push to capitalize on the chaos in Libya.
For over a year, it has carried out terror attacks, taken over territory and released propaganda from its franchise in Libya. Now, a new assessment from the Pentagonstates the number of ISIS fighters in Libya has doubled since the fall to over 5,000, spurring fresh debate among security officials over the possibility of foreign intervention.
Analysts and officials worry that Libya is increasingly becoming a sort of fallback option for ISIS as it loses territory and power in Syria and Iraq.
“If we look at the raw numbers, the presence of ISIS [in Libya] is definitely strengthening and growing. I think the security threat they pose is definitely going up,” Riccardo Fabiani, senior North Africa analyst at political risk research firm Eurasia Group, told The WorldPost.
ISIS’s growth in Libya began in 2011:
The rise of the Islamic State affiliate in Libya coincides with the country’s continued conflict. Libya has been in a state of turmoil since a popular uprising backed by a NATO-led airstrike campaign ousted strongman Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Part of the key to ISIS’s success as a terror organization is its ability to metastasize in places that lack a strong civil society or central government. This was most evident in the group’s large period of growth between 2011 and 2014, when itbenefited from the civil war in Syria and seized much of the territory it still holds.
In Libya, ISIS has found similar conditions in which to thrive. Since 2014, powerful militias have controlled the country, which is split between two rival governments — one based in the western city of Tripoli and another in the eastern city of Tobruk. Efforts to establish a U.N.-backed national unity government have failed, and much of the country is lawless.
They call Libya “Hillary’s War.” Afterward, she found the affair quite amusing:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y[/youtube]
More recently when asked to defend her actions in Libya, she asserted:
CLINTON: Well, we did have a plan, and I think it’s fair to say that of all of the Arab leaders, Gaddafi probably had more blood on his hands of Americans than anybody else. And when he moved on his own people, threatening a massacre, genocide, the Europeans and the Arabs, our allies and partners, did ask for American help and we provided it. And we didn’t put a single boot on the ground, and Gaddafi was deposed. The Libyans turned out for one of the most successful, fairest elections that any Arab country has had. They elected moderate leaders. Now, there has been a lot of turmoil and trouble as they have tried to deal with these radical elements which you find in this arc of instability, from north Africa to Afghanistan. And it is imperative that we do more not only to help our friends and partners protect themselves and protect our own homeland, but also to work to try to deal with this arc of instability, which does have a lot of impact on what happens in a country like Libya.
It ought to sound familiar to you. The problem for Clinton is that none of it is true:
Specifically, her misstatements ought to have been corrected along these lines: Gaddafi didn’t have “more blood on his hands of Americans than anybody else,” unless you discount the Saudi support for Al Qaeda. He did not threaten “genocide,” no matter how slack your definition of genocide. He threatened to kill the rebels in Benghazi; the threat was dismissed by US army intelligence as improbable and poorly sourced. But Hillary Clinton overrode US intelligence, outmaneuvered the Pentagon (the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, had opposed the NATO bombing unreservedly), mobilized liberal-humanitarian and conservative pro-war opinion in the media, and talked Obama into committing the US to effect regime change in a third Middle East country.
Gaddafi was not “deposed.” He was tortured and murdered, very likely by Islamists allied with NATO forces. The “radical elements” that are causing “a lot of turmoil and trouble” in “this arc of instability” are, in fact, Islamists whom Clinton picked as allies in the region, and she has pressed to supply them with arms in Syria as well as Libya. She really rates mention as an American mover of the “instability” in the region second only to Bush and Cheney.
I take issue with the last sentence and so would Barack Obama, who declared Iraq a success:
…we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq…
There is more criticism from the left, including the failure of the media to press her on the Libya disaster fallout:
Yet the answer didn’t hurt the Democratic frontrunner. That’s because neither CNN moderators nor prospective Clinton supporters understand the magnitude of the catastrophe that occurred amid the predictable power vacuum that followed Ghadafi’s ouster. “Libya today—in spite of the expectations we had at the time of the revolution—it’s much, much worse,” Karim Mezran, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, toldFrontline. “Criminality is skyrocketing. Insecurity is pervasive. There are no jobs. It’s hard to get food and electricity. There’s fighting, there’s fear … I see very few bright spots.”
U.S. arms found their way into the hands of Islamists.
This might have something to do with the weak overall support for Hillary.Not surprisingly, ISIS has been largely absent from the democrat debates, and even Tom Brokaw noticed that democrats have no idea what to do with ISIS:
“Well, what’s been missing from the Democratic side however, is what is the international policy? What are they going to do about ISIL? What are we going to do? We’re in a war, and there’s been almost no discussion on the Democratic side,” Brokaw said.
Brokaw singled out Sanders by asking him what he would do to handle ISIL.
“I asked Bernie Sanders the other day, he wandered all over the landscape, but clearly didn’t have an idea about how he would deal with what’s going on in the Middle East if he gets there,” Brokaw said.
That’s a real problem, because Barack Obama is not going to defeat ISIS. Yesterday Donald Trump suggested that Obama might not want to defeat ISIS. Yes, Obama doesn’t want to defeat ISIS. I wrote that a few months ago. obama is not going to defeat ISIS and will not defeat ISIS because he won’t do what it takes to defeat ISIS. He doesn’t even know what to do in Libya:
The White House is monitoring the threat closely, but Obama wants to avoid establishing an air or ground presence in yet another war-torn Middle Eastern country. Libya is embroiled in a civil war in which various militias are too busy fighting each other to worry much about fighting ISIS, and teams of U.S. Special Operations Forces working to change that have had little success.
The ongoing chaos has allowed ISIS to continue growing and solidifying its presence along the coast. Senior ISIS commanders are taking advantage of the territory to escape U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
“Some of their members, especially those with long-term importance to [ISIS], are taking refuge here,” Ismail Shukri, the head of intelligence in the Libyan city of Misrata, told the BBC. “They view Libya as a safe haven.”
Something has to be done about ISIS and not just because of the chemical weapons. Syrian refugees are fleeing ostensibly because of the violence in the Syrian-Iraq region. ISIS is concealing operatives among the refugees and is planning attacks in the US. The flow of Syrian refugees brings high financial and social costs. It won’t stop until ISIS is stopped.It will take a coalition. It will take boots on the ground. A lot less micro-managing is needed.
Barack Obama has no interest in stopping them. He is leaving this mess for his successor. That is his plan. It’s why he announced a three year plan for ISIS in 2014 and it never even had the defeat of ISIS as a goal. It was all about reducing them to a “manageable” state. And in 2017 when ISIS is still there, Barack Obama won’t be. He’ll be on a cart on B7 of the Hawaii Prince Golf Course sipping a Yuengling after blading his tee shot.
Part of me would like to see Hillary have to face the disaster she was so instrumental in creating. It’s no wonder she doesn’t want this in the debates. We still don’t know why Hillary wanted Libya toppled, but I continue to wonder if it was about the money.
Bonus: Here’s how Hillary’s campaign treats the American flag
http://twitter.com/postpolitics/status/697144962224365568/photo/1
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.