Dear Chairman Gowdy -- America is counting on your backbone!

By Joan Swirsky

To: Chairman Trey Gowdy and the Select Committee on Benghazi

Your investigation is a huge relief to millions of Americans like me who have wondered and agonized over the past almost-two years about the actual events that happened before, during, and after the September 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the horrific murders of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and embassy security personnel and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

Another State Department employee, diplomatic security agent David Ubben, was gravely injured while under attack with Woods and Doherty, but like other survivors he has been forbidden by the Obama Administration from speaking publicly about his ordeal.

However, as reported by Catherine Herridge of Fox News, when the late Florida Congressman Bill Young met Ubben at Walter Reed Medical Center last summer, he said that Ubben "emphasized the fact" that the attack on the Benghazi compound "was a very very military type of operation...they had knowledge of almost everything in the compound...they knew where the gasoline was, they knew where the generators were, they knew where the safe room was, they knew more than they should have about that compound."

Will the Select Committee include the testimony of Ubben and the other muzzled victims, and will it explore who sabotaged the Americans by revealing to the terrorists "more than they should have known about the compound"?

Of course, neither your Select Committee nor my letter to you would have seen the light of day if the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch had not been successful in their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which revealed "the smoking gun" e-mail in which Benjamin J. Rhodes, then-White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser, laid out several goals for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to meet on the five Sunday-morning TV shows she was scheduled to appear on, chief of which was: "To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy."

According to Dick Morris, former advisor to President Bill Clinton, a full day and a half before Rhodes sent his email advising Susan Rice to blame the Benghazi attacks on the video, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the identical language in a statement of her own.

This suggests, Morris says, "at the very least, a close coordination between and White House and Hillary Clinton to deceive the American people about the true nature of the attack in Benghazi. And it may also be evidence that Hillary Clinton engineered that decision immediately following the attacks. Was the cover-up Hillary's idea?"

In addition, Morris is emphatic in saying that the CIA talking points were in no way related to the White House talking points, which seem to have been made up out of whole cloth.

Will the Select Committee vigorously investigate the allegation that this 19-month cover-up was instigated by Hillary Clinton? Alternatively, will you get to the bottom of who exactly created the fiction of the video?

On the Sunday morning talk shows, on September 16, 2012, Susan Rice obediently told the nation that the murderous Benghazi attack was the result of a demonstration in Cairo (that had spread to Benghazi) protesting an obscure anti-Muslim video, and not a highly organized terrorist offensive that was launched with the full knowledge – and possible collaboration? – of the White House in order to burnish Barack Obama's reputation as a strong leader and thereby maximize his chances for reelection in the run-up to the 2012 presidential race. Those talking points were repeated for weeks on end by Barack Obama, Jay Carney, Hillary Clinton, and a media – save for a few exceptions – acting more like a protection racket than journalists

Among the top administration personnel who received the Rhodes memo were White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, then-White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, and then-White House Senior Advisor and political strategist David Plouffe, all of whom – and others – launched a massive disinformation campaign that persisted until Rhodes' incriminating e-mail surfaced last month and Speaker John Boehner backed a vote for a Select Committee, with subpoena power, to untangle almost two years worth of White House web-weaving.

Interestingly, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been asking the State Department for Rhodes' and other relevant e-mails since last August, but they were purposefully withheld.

Will the Select Committee address the criminal action involved in withholding evidence from a congressional committee and if such action is found will the consequences be commensurate with the crime?

According to blogger Jeff Dunetz, a State Department e-mail that was released by Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz on May 1, 2014, proves the State Department was certain on the day of the Benghazi attack that it was conducted by al Qaeda affiliate Ansar Al-Sharia. The e-mail was entitled "Libya update from Beth Jones" and was sent the very day of the attack, September 11, 2012.

Jones, who was then Assistant Secretary of State to Hillary Clinton, wrote in her e-mail: "the extremist group Ansar Al-Sharia has taken credit for the attack in Benghazi..."


Jones' e-mail was copied to Deputy Secretary William Burns; Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman; Jake Sullivan, then-Deputy Chief of Staff (now national security advisor to VP Joe Biden); Under Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy; Cheryl Mills, then-Secretary Clinton's Chief of Staff, and Victoria Nuland, then-State Dept. spokesperson (now Asst. Secretary of State).

The idea that the above CC list received Jones' stunning report but that it somehow eluded Hillary Clinton, her boss, who proceeded to meet the grieving families, look in their eyes, and repeat the preposterous falsehood that the attack was the result of a video insulting to Muslims, simply begs credibility.

Will the Select Committee interview all of the above people to reinforce the fact that State knew immediately that it was Ansar Al-Sharia who attacked our citizens and that anyone who said otherwise committed perjury?

A kidnapping plan was ostensibly formulated and financed by then-President of Egypt Mohamed Morsi who, for three months prior to the attack, had been loudly demanding the release of the "Blind Sheik" Omar Abdel-Rahman, now serving a life sentence in North Carolina for his role as the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. In fact, Morsi assured hundreds of thousands of his supporters in Cairo that he would exact Rahman's release, a promise he repeated just one week before the Benghazi assault.

A month earlier, in August 2012, Morsi's de facto boss, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the leader of al Qaeda, issued a Fatwa that was published worldwide and demanded that Muslims attack American citizens, interests, and military installations anywhere and everywhere for the purpose of freeing Rahman.

The objective of Morsi's plan was to grab Ambassador Stevens, make sure that he was unharmed, and then exchange him for the blind sheik. The result, of course, would be that Morsi would get his sheik and Obama would hold an elaborate Rose Garden ceremony in which he'd be seen as "heroic" for "saving" our ambassador – just weeks before the 2012 election!

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Valerie Jarrett, and Huma Abedin all have close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Were they too abetting Morsi by doing Al-Zawahiri's bidding? It appears that Al-Zawahiri was calling the shots and our White House was obeying his directives! It is not a stretch to imagine that Morsi set up the faux attack on our Cairo embassy to distract the media while his kidnapping plot was unfolding in Benghazi.

All this explains why Stevens' repeated requests for additional security – on July 9, 2012; on August 16, 2012, when a classified cable, reported on by Fox News, warned Sec. Clinton and other State Department employees of an emergency meeting in Benghazi as a result of rapidly deteriorating security; and when Stevens screamed and pleaded for help while being dragged through the compound's courtyard – were turned down by Sec. Clinton. Simply, the Benghazi facility had to be unprotected for the kidnappers to carry out their mission.

Does this not also explain why, on the most provocative day of the year – September 11th – and in one of the most dangerous hotspots on earth, there was not only a complete lack of security in the Benghazi compound, but no rapid-response teams were sent immediately after the powers-that-be in the White House were notified of the attack?

And is it not now crystal clear why it took the FBI a full three weeks to visit the burned-out facility, conveniently giving Morsi's operatives on the ground in Benghazi the opportunity to clean out and destroy any incriminating evidence?

Will the Select Committee demand all videotapes and transcripts of the night of the Benghazi attack, including of drones, and conduct an in-depth examination of the ongoing relationship between the Obama administration and Mohamed Morsi, including assistance of any kind given to the deposed Egyptian president to this day?

The ties of this administration to the Muslim Brotherhood are troubling to those of us who know of that organization's philosophy and close ties to al Qaeda. Clearly, the words of Refaat Saïd – leader of Egypt's Socialist party, al-Tagammu', and previously close friend of former Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide, Mahdi Akef – must be taken literally:

"The organization of the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization, and anyone who asks either to reconcile with them, to join them or to ally with them is himself a terrorist."

Both Walid Shoebat – a former Muslim Brotherhood member who converted to Christianity and now exposes the terrorists among us – here, and Pamela Geller, here, report that Rhodes' "smoking gun" email revealed the instruction to Susan Rice to blame the Benghazi attack on a video and also exposed a recipient of that e-mail named Mehdi K. Alhassani, the former leader of the Muslim Student Association, which is a Muslim Brotherhood front group.

"It is a mystery," Geller says, "how Alhassani slipped through the cracks to become a Special Assistant to the Office of the Chief of Staff, National Security Council Staff, and Executive Office of the President," adding that "it is unknown why a few hours before the Benghazi attack, Alhassani met in the White House with Samir Mayekar, a George Soros 'fellow' for an unscheduled visit."

The American Thinker's James Lewis says that most people are still missing the strategic meaning of Benghazi. "Under Obama we have secretly joined the terrorist side in the Jihad War. That is the strategic meaning of Benghazi...a forty-year policy led by the Left to favor Islamic fascism is not, repeat not, an accident."

Lewis cites intelligence analyst and former CIA officer Clare Lopez and a group of distinguished retired military and intelligence experts "who released a statement last week that was quickly covered up by the media." But Britain's Daily Mail did report that after a seven-month review, the group determined that the Benghazi attack "could have been prevented – if the U.S. hadn't been helping to arm al-Qaeda militias throughout Libya a year earlier."

According to Lopez, "the United States switched sides in the war on terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures." She said the Obama administration tacitly approved the diversion of half of a billion-dollar Qatari arms shipment to al-Qaeda-linked militants – arms that killed "Christian children in Syria and Kenya in the name of Allah." The full report is here.

Further, Lewis makes this connection: "Huma [Abedin] was Hillary's closest aide as Secretary of State, and therefore privy to numerous secrets. You can bet that Mohammed Morsi in Egypt knew all about the inner workings of Hillary's State Department. Hillary was in charge during the Benghazi debacle. Just connect the dots."

Walid Shoebat has connected a lot of dots and expands at length on Abedin and her extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in "The Abedin Affairs with Al Saud."

In addition, it is well known that Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, and her chief-of-staff Huma Abedin enthusiastically supported Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood election and have worked vigorously against the Egyptian military that launched the successful coup d' état that deposed Morsi in July of 2013. In fact, Abedin not only edited a Muslim Sisterhood magazine, but has close ties through her family to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Of great concern is the large number of sharia advisors that Barack Obama has appointed to high-security positions, including Homeland Security, as detailed by writer Leon Puissegur, who says that "their plans are to place their candidates into elections to win so they can destroy the Constitution and create a nation of Islamic laws!"

Journalist John Rossomando further documents the degree to which the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the Obama administration, including the White House.

And that is not to omit the fact that in 2011, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton refused to designate Boko Haram, the al Qaeda affiliate, as a terrorist organization despite the repeated urging of the FBI, CIA, and DOJ and over a dozen senators – the same Boko Haram (which means "Western education is forbidden") that just kidnapped 276 young Nigerian Christian girls with the goal of raping and enslaving them. No doubt the terrorist group used weapons that were never secured after Gaddafi's ouster in Libya and made their way to Boko Haram. Was this yet another example of Sec. Clinton's blind eye?

Will the Select Committee exhaustively explore the possibly seditious links between the current administration and al Qaeda-affiliated Muslim Brotherhood and Boko Haram?

Initially, it appeared that the Morsi-orchestrated event went as planned, with a cell-phone video showing Stevens being removed from the charred building and the audio portion recording the voices of witnesses yelling, "Allahu-Akbar, Allahu-Akbar! He's alive! He's alive!" before whisking him off to an al Qaeda-operated hospital, where tragically he died.

In a damning report, Doug Ross confirms the kidnapping scenario and provides a detailed and Complete Benghazi Timeline.

With Stevens' death, however, Morsi's grand kidnapping scheme failed. But six long hours passed before anyone knew what had become of Ambassador Stevens. It appears that Morsi was waiting for word from his kidnapping squad on the ground so he could then inform his pals in the White House. But no word was forthcoming.

Journalist/author Jack Cashill is curious about what Obama did on September 11, 2012, and spells out an hour-by-hour scenario that includes where he wasn't. According to national security spokesman Tommy Vietor, Obama was not in the White House Situation Room where military strategy is planned.

It is of more than passing interest that blogger Dunetz reports that when Vietor spoke to Fox News' Bret Baier a couple of weeks ago, he told the anchor that he himself was involved in editing the Benghazi talking points. But Mike Morell, deputy director of the CIA at the time, said in sworn testimony that except for changing one word, the White House had no role in changing the talking points. "Either Tommy Vietor lied to Bret Baier or Mike Morell lied during his testimony to Congress," Dunetz writes.

Will the Select Committee definitively determine if Tommy Vietor lied or if Mike Morell committed perjury?

Cashill continues: "At 3:40 p.m. Washington time" "[Ambassador] Stevens called his number two man in Tripoli, Greg Hicks, and told him, 'Greg, we're under attack.' At 4:05 p.m. the State Department Operations Center issued an alert to all relevant agencies: 'U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack.' There was no lack of communication to the outside world."

General Carter F. Ham, Commander of U.S. Africa Command, who was visiting the Pentagon, said that the fact attackers were using rocket-propelled grenades and well-aimed small arms fire made it clear to him that "this was certainly a terrorist attack...." He personally shared the news with General Martin E. Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and both "immediately" briefed then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

At 5 p.m. Obama met with Panetta and Dempsey in the White House for a prescheduled meeting, and he "authorized the pair to take relevant steps, leaving the specifics up to them. They had no further contact with the president that evening and none at all with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton."

"About 10 p.m. that evening," Cashill says, "Obama made another phone call. Five months would pass before anyone admitted he did so....soon after that 10 p.m. phone call, Secretary Clinton released a memo on the Benghazi attack. The timing suggests she and Obama coordinated the blame-the-video misdirection during their call. To this point in the evening, no one in the military or on the ground in Libya had mentioned the video or suggested that the assault on the consulate was anything other than a coordinated attack."

Cashill concludes that on the night of September 11, "Obama retreated....for the next two months he did what the Clintons did after the demise of TWA Flight 800: he just kicked the investigatory can down the road and hoped that the media would not call attention to the kicking. If the Clintons could get away with it, why not he?"

Will the Select Committee interview or re-interview Tommy Vietor, Gen. Martin Dempsey, Leon Panetta, Gen. Carter Ham, and, again, Hillary Clinton, to determine the accuracy of the above timeline and if there was any collaboration between Clinton and Obama in both (1) hatching the idea for the Benghazi attack, the better to satisfy Morsi's goal of freeing the sheik, and (2) creating the idea of blaming the attack on an anti-Muslim video? Will the Select Committee determine if either Vietor or Morell lied? And will the Select Committee include the White House's collaboration with the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi as a primary line of inquiry? In addition, instead of dispatching drones for observation of the attack, on whose orders did General Ham fail to send out fighter jets for several low-flying passes over the Benghazi attack area to scare and drive off the terrorist attackers?

During the attack in Benghazi, no military force came to the rescue of Ambassador Stevens and the three other Americans who died. Was the military given orders to stand down? While there are plenty of denials about this, including from our military, Chad Miller at www.dcclothesline.com has written that it might have been none other than Valerie Jarrett who issued such an order. He cites an August 2013 Rush Limbaugh broadcast in which the radio host presents a timeline of the evening of September 11, 2012, when Obama seemed to be missing in action.

Will the Select Committee determine who exactly is running the foreign policy of the United States of America? Is it White House advisor and assistant to the president Valerie Jarrett? Obama top political advisor David Axelrod? Top Democrat donor George Soros? The Muslim Brotherhood?

As reported by writer and private investigator Douglas Hagmann, a CIA whistleblower faces the ire of an angry Justice Department over Benghazi questions regarding illegal gun-running.

Hagmann reports that Robert "Tosh" Plumlee posted 11 "questions" to his Facebook page, which placed him under the threat of a subpoena by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to (1) legally silence him and (2) find out the sources of the information he revealed.

Here is a small sample of Plumlee's questions:

1. Is the United States secretly arming and supporting various factions of the Syrian rebels with high caliber impact weapons from the United States' arsenals?
   
   
2. Will our troops one day again face these American-made weapons on some foreign battlefield?
   
   
3. Did our ambassador and others, weeks before they were murdered, notify our State Department and CIA that Syrian rebels had obtained U.S. weapons, including "Stinger missiles" from Jordan, Turkey, and Pakistan, shipped from CIA safe houses?
   
   
4. Were they told to "stand down"?
   

Will the Select Committee investigate what the CIA was doing in Benghazi? Were guns being smuggled covertly and illegally from Benghazi through Turkey to the Syrian rebels – who were members of al Qaeda? And was Ambassador Stevens protesting that operation or facilitating the transfer? Will the Select Committee expose the fact that the al Qaeda jihadists that American taxpayers armed and financed to overthrow Gaddafi's Libyan regime in October 2011 are the exact same jihadists who murdered the four Americans in Benghazi?

Chairman Gowdy, Americans are aware that for investigating this important event, you have received death threats from those who are deeply threatened by this line of inquiry. Please know that you and your committee members will remain in the thoughts and prayers of the liberty-loving people in our country.

If Democrats refuse to join – or choose to boycott – your efforts, as Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) so shamefully suggested on a recent news show, they will be viewed as aiding and abetting what appears to be a massive cover-up and therefore appropriately guilty by association.

In closing, I cite former U.S. attorney, prosecutor of the "Blind Sheik," writer and author Andrew C. McCarthy, whose new book – Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama's Impeachment – will be published June 3.

"The chief executive, James Madison asserted, would be wholly 'responsible for [the] conduct' of his subordinate officials. Therefore, it would 'subject [the president] to impeachment himself, if he suffers them to perpetrate with impunity high crimes or misdemeanors against the United States, or neglects to superintend their conduct, so as to check their excesses....when AFRICOM abstains from battle, or Lois Lerner obstructs an investigation, or Eric Holder misleads Congress, or Michael Morell doctors talking points, or Susan Rice serially lies on national television, Barack Obama is responsible. It is his bidding that they do, and by failing to fire or discipline them he implicitly endorses their malfeasance."

Godspeed, Mr. Chairman.

Sincerely yours,

Joan Swirsky

www.JoanSwirsky.com

© Joan Swirsky