Did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton take America into her own personal civil war in a Muslim country ?

The tale of the tape  —  Now it’s Tripoli AND Benghazi AND the Libyan Desert AND....  The real Libya story is a growing problem for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton  —  and it’s much bigger than the 9/11/12 Benghazi fiasco

I promised more about an aborted coup by some of America's generals and admirals  —  here’s a small part of the lead-up to it

BTW  —   Just how many unnecessary wars did Hillary help drag the U.S.A. into ?   —   And was the disclosure of these “Libya Tapes” the real reason that Hillary pushed back her presidential campaign roll-out ?

Yesterday, Fox News reported that “Pentagon officials were so concerned with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's push in 2011 to back Libyan rebels against Muammar Qaddafi that they opened their own back-channels with Qaddafi to try and prevent the U.S. from entering the civil war, according to a report that cited newly uncovered audio tapes....”  ( See  “Report: Pentagon officials opened back-channels with Qaddafi regime to slow Clinton push into war” by Fox News Staff, 1/29/15, Fox News/ Pentagon [http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/01/29/report-pentagon-officials-opened-secret-talks-with-qaddafi-regime-to-slow/]).

SOME IN  THE U.S. MILITARY WERE WORRIED THAT SOS HILLARY CLINTON WAS PUSHING US INTO AN UNNECESSARY WAR IN LIBYA

According to that report, “Pentagon officials used an intelligence "liaison" to communicate with Qaddafi's son and a top Libyan leader outside of White House or State Department knowledge. A senior Democratic congressman also reportedly was involved....  That unnamed intermediary, who is referred to as an intelligence ‘asset’ working for the Pentagon, not only conducted the conversations with Qaddafi's son, but reportedly shared his concern that Clinton was unnecessarily hyping the danger of a potential genocide by the regime as a way to drag Congress into and shift public opinion in favor of an invasion....”

Fox News gives credit to “The Washington Times” for breaking the story.

LIBYANS COMPARED HILLARY’S FALSE JUSTIFICATION TO LAUNCH A WAR AGAINST LIBYA TO  WHAT GEORGE W. BUSH DID IN IRAQ

According to the WT report, there were tapes, which were reviewed by that paper and authenticated by the participants in the conversations recorded.  And those tapes  chronicled some U.S. officials’ unfiltered conversations with Colonel Moammar Qaddafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms by all involved,  that Secretary Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community’s concerns (See “Exclusive: Secret tapes undermine Hillary Clinton on Libyan war –  Joint Chiefs, key lawmaker held own talks with Moammar [Qaddafi]regime” by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro &  Kelly Riddell, 1/28/15,  The Washington Times [http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/28/hillary-clinton-undercut-on-libya-war-by-pentagon-/][@washtimes on Twitter]).  Seif Qaddafi, told American officials in the secret conversations that he was worried Mrs. Clinton was using false pretenses to justify unseating his father and insisted that the regime had no intention of harming a mass of civilians. He compared Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for war to that of the George W. Bush administration’s now debunked weapons of mass destruction accusations, which were used to lobby Congress to invade Iraq, the tapes show.

According to the Washington Times, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton declined to provide any comment about the recordings; and the State Department also declined to answer questions about separate contacts from the Pentagon and a senior Democratic Party Congressman with the Qaddafi regime, but did say that the goal of Secretary Clinton and President Obama was regime change in Libya

PENTAGON’S BACK-CHANNEL COMMUNICATIONS WITH LIBYAN REGIME WAS “AN EXTRAORDINARY DEPARTURE FROM TRADITIONAL POLICY"

The secretly recorded conversations reveal an extraordinary departure from traditional policy, in which the U.S. government speaks with one voice to foreign governments with all communications coordinated by the State Department.  Instead, these tapes show that the Pentagon’s senior uniformed leadership and a congressman from Mrs. Clinton’s own party conveyed sentiments to the Libyan regime that undercut or conflicted with the Secretary of State’s own message at the time.

DEMOCRAT CONGRESSMAN HAD BACK-CHANNEL TALKS WITH LIBYANS TO GET ACCURATE INFORMATION  —  HIS FINDINGS WERE IGNORED BY BOTH THE STATE DEPARTMENT AND THE WHITE HOUSE

A senior Democratic congressman said that he did back-channel communications with the Libyan regime, because he wanted to get all the information he could to share with his congressional colleagues. He said that he feared Secretary of State Clinton was using an emotional argument to sell a war against Libya that wasn’t warranted by the actual facts on the ground.

That congressman also said that he had sent formal letters to both the State Department and the White House about his efforts to communicate with the Qaddafi  regime and the results of those communications.  Neither the State Department nor the White House ever responded to the congressman or his letters.

MILITARY SET UP ITS OWN COMMUNICATIONS WITH QADDAFI

Both inside and outside the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was among the most vocal early proponents of using U.S. military force to unseat Colonel Muammar Qaddafi Joining her in making the case were French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, and her successor as secretary of state, John F. Kerry.

Secretary Clinton’s main argument in the summer of 2011 was that Muammar Qaddafi was about to engage in a genocide against civilians in Benghazi, which the rebels held as their center of power. But defense intelligence officials could not corroborate those concerns; and in fact, their assessment was that Qaddafi was unlikely to risk world outrage by inflicting mass casualties, Pentagon officials told The Washington Times. As a result, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, strongly opposed Hillary Clinton’s recommendation to use U.S. military might against Qaddafi's forces. 

Because of the refusal of the White House and State Department to heed intelligence and military input into its regime change strategy for Libya, the Pentagon went its own way and established communications with Seif Qaddafi through one of his friends, a U.S. businessman, who acted as the intermediary. The goal was to identify a clear path and strategy forward in Libya — something that wasn’t articulated by the White House or State Department at the time, according to Pentagon officials.

As the intelligence asset working with the Joint Chiefs kept his contacts going, one U.S. general made an attempt to negotiate directly with his Libyan military counterparts, according to interviews conducted by The Washington Times with officials directly familiar with the overture. And even after the conflict began, U.S. military leaders kept looking for a way out and a way to avoid the power vacuum that would be left in the region if the government of Colonel Qaddafi fell.

HILLARY HAS A LOT TO ANSWER FOR  —   WHAT HAPPENED BECAUSE OF HILLARY CLINTON’S  “ LEADERSHIP ” IN 2011 NEEDS TO BE LOOKED AT AND QUESTIONED IF SHE RUNS FOR PRESIDENT IN 2016

If Clinton runs for president between now and 2016, her style of leadership as it relates to foreign policy must be viewed through the one war that she personally championed during her tenure as Secretary of State. Among the key questions every candidate must answer is how they will react when faced with serious security incidents around he world; part and parcel of that is how they assess U.S. intelligence and solicit the advice of the military leadership.  —   America’s 2011-2012 Libyan experience with Hillary Clinton at the helm at the State Department clearly answers a lot of those questions.

Numerous U.S. officials interviewed by The Washington Times confirmed that it was Secretary of State Clinton, and not President Obama, who led the charge to use NATO military force to unseat Qaddafi as Libya’s leader.  They specifically noted that Clinton repeatedly dismissed the warnings offered by career military and intelligence officials.  In the tapes, a U.S. intelligence liaison working for the Pentagon told a Qaddafi aide that President Obama had privately informed members of Congress that Libya “is all Secretary Clinton’s matter” and that the nation’s highest-ranking generals were concerned that President Obama had been misinformed by Secretary Clinton.

Some of the criticism of the U.S. Libya policy at the time came from important quarters. Sergey Ivanovich Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., told The Washington Times the following: “The U.N. Security Council resolution on Libya was meant to create a no-fly zone to prevent bombing of civilians....  NATO countries that participated in this intervention were supposed to patrol the area. However, in a short amount of time the NATO flights — initially meant to stop violence on the ground — went far beyond the scope of the Security Council-mandated task and created even more violence in Libya.”

On March 19, 2011, the U.S. military, supported by France and Britain, fired off more than 110 Tomahawk missiles, hitting about 20 Libyan air and missile defense targets. Within weeks, a NATO airstrike killed one of Qaddafi’s sons and three grandsons at their the family’s Tripoli compound, sparking debate about whether the colonel and his family were legitimate targets under the U.N. resolution. Secretary of Defense Gates said the compound was targeted because it included command-and-control facilities.

In August, 2011, Muammar Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli was overrun, signaling the end of his 42-year reign and forcing him into hiding. Two months later, Qaddafi, 69, was killed in his hometown of Sirte. His son Seif was captured by the Zintan tribe and remains in solitary confinement in a Zintan prison cell.

Since Colonel Qaddafi was removed from power, Libya has been in a constant state of chaos, with factional infighting, terrorist cells inside and outside the major cities and no uniting leader.  For Americans, the worst exhibition of that chaos and terrorist activity occurred on 9/11/2012, when the U.S. Mission in Benghazi was attacked by Al Queda-affiliated terrorists resulting in the deaths of four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya.

Last week, an attack on a luxury hotel in Tripoli killed nine people, including one American. A group calling itself the Islamic State-Tripoli Province took responsibility for the attack, indicating a growing presence of anti-American terrorist groups within the country.