Obama falls for Iran’s fake fatwa against nuclear weapons, according to MEMRI.

No documentary evidence backs up President Barack Obama’s claim that Iran’s theocratic rulers have issued a religious edict against the development of nuclear weapons, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors and translates news reports from Arab and Persian outlets.

The claim is an eight-year old hoax promoted since 2005 by Iran’s diplomats and by Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says MEMRI.

The Islamic “fatwa,” or religiously-justified law, “was never issued by [Iran’s] Supreme Leader [Ali] Khamenei and does not exist; neither the Iranian regime nor anybody else can present it,” MEMRI reported on Sunday.

Obama is expected to face media questions on Monday when he holds a meeting about Iran’s nuke programs with Israel’s prime minister Bibi Netanyahu.

Obama claimed on Friday that the fatwa does exist, and could lead to a deal with Iran to end its development of nuclear weapons.

“I do believe that there is a basis for a resolution [because] Iran’s Supreme Leader has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons,” he told reporters from the White House’ press podium.

Obama’s decision to continue international nuclear discussions with Iran has resulted in yet another round of talks over Iran’s weapons program.

Those talks have been underway since 1992, when the International Atomic Energy Agency visited Iran to gauge compliance with anti-proliferation regulations. Since then, Iran has developed its own missiles, and has begun manufacturing the critical fuel for nuclear bombs.

The renewed talks are generally opposed by Israel and various Arab countries, who fear they will not stop Iran’s weapons development, but will stop military strikes similar to the 1981 strike that wrecked Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

In April 2012, MEMRI reported that the fatwa is not mentioned on Khameni’s official website, and an official comment evaded a question about the existence of the supposed fatwa.

That comment answered a March 2012 question, asking, “in light of what is written in Surat Al-Anfal, Verse 60… is it also forbidden to obtain nuclear weapons, as per your ruling that their use is prohibited?”

Khameni’s answer, according to MEMRI, was “your letter has no jurisprudential aspect. When it has a jurisprudent position, then it will be possible to answer it.”

The no-comment side-stepped a direct clash between the supposed anti-nuke fatwa and one of the many aggressive verses in the Koran, which is believed to be verbatim directions from the Muslim deity, Allah.

The questioner cited “Verse 60” in the Anfal chapter of the Koran, which orders Muslims to “prepare against [non-Muslims] whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah.”

A list of 493 Iranian fatwas was published in July by a Iranian website linked to the theocratic regime military guard, according to an Aug. 13 report issued by MEMRI.

“These fatwas cover a wide range of issues, from political and cultural to religious, and include such topics as the treatment of Baha’is, trade with Israeli companies, religious purity and uncleanness, the status of women, and more…. [but the supposed nuclear fatwa] is not included in this compilation,” MEMRI said.

The fatwas bar the use of a toilet if an Islamic religious item falls into it, require worshippers to “purify” themselves only once if they fart during prayer, allows people to take alcohol-infused medicine if they don’t know about the alcohol, and proscribe lying to non-Muslims during commercial transactions, according to MEMRI.

The fatwa’s existence was first claimed in 2005 by an Iranian diplomatic Sirus Naseri, during a meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors.

The claimed was repeated in April 2012 in a Washington Post op-ed by by Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi. “Almost seven years ago, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei… issued a religious edict — a fatwa — forbidding the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons,” Salehi wrote. The article did not provide a link or an image of the supposed fatwa.

In April 2102, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also cited the supposed fatwa, but noted that its nature and purpose were unclear.

“The other interesting development which you may have followed was the repetition by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei that they would – that he had issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons, against weapons of mass destruction,” Clinton told attendees at a NATO conference in Norfolk, Va.

“Prime Minister Erdogan and I discussed this at some length, and I’ve discussed with a number of experts and religious scholars… If it is indeed a statement of principle, of values, then it is a starting point for being operationalized, which means that it serves as the entryway into a negotiation,” she said.

Erdogan is an Islamist, has supported the international Muslim Brotherhood, including its HAMAS affiliate in Gaza and has bitterly criticized Israel on many occasions. Turkey borders Iran, and both share some trade and security interests.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/30/obama-falls-for-irans-fake-fatwa-against-nuclear-weapons-according-to-memri/#ixzz2gOjuValW

Democrats have fought debt ceiling hikes many times.

Obama claims that Republican efforts to tie a new debt ceiling increase to GOP budget priorities have “never [been] seen in the history” of the country, the Democratic Party has consistently battled debt ceiling increases when Republican presidents were in power.

With the Treasury Department announcing that the U.S. will reach its borrowing capacity by Oct. 17, a debate over raising the debt ceiling will likely consume the attention of Capitol Hill next month, with Republicans pushing for certain budgetary concessions in return for raising America’s borrowing limit. President Obama calls such demands unprecedented.

“You have never seen in the history of the United States the debt ceiling or the threat of not raising the debt being used to extort a president or a governing party and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and nothing to do with the debt,” Obama said before the Business Roundtable.

In fact, the Democrats of the 1980s repeatedly used the debt ceiling issue to force President Reagan not to increase defense spending. And Obama himself used the issue of the debt ceiling in his battle against President George W. Bush’s tax cuts.

In 1981, the Democrats opposed efforts to increase the debt limit and accused Republicans of “conscience-less” politics targeting the poor, according to The Milwaukee Journal.

Some Republican Senate members ultimately joined the Democrats’ call not to increase the debt ceiling. “Ignoring the Administration’s call for a bigger line of credit to enable it to pay its bills, the Senate has refused to raise the national debt ceiling to $1.45 trillion,” wrote the Pittsburgh Press on November 1, 1983, in an article titled “Senate snubs Regan, refuses to increase debt limit.”

This was not the only time the Democrats used the debt ceiling vote as leverage during the Reagan presidency to extract budget concessions.

The Democratic-led House tried to force the Republican Senate “into a compromise on military spending to trim the huge federal deficit,” wrote the Union Democrat on June 28, 1984, in an article titled “House Says No To Higher Debt Ceiling.” The House “twice rejected an increase in the federal debt ceiling needed to keep the government’s borrowing authority alive,” according to the paper.

More recently, in 2006, then-Sen. Obama used the debt ceiling as a stick to hit Bush.

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills,” Obama said [pdf] in March 2006. “It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. Over the past five years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion. That is  ‘trillion’ with a ‘T.’ That is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers.”

Since assuming power, Obama has backed off his alarmism about “foreign countries,” telling the always credulous David Letterman last September, “A lot of [the debt] we owe to ourselves.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/29/democrats-have-fought-debt-ceiling-hikes-many-times/#ixzz2gOj3eHuq

Holder to sue North Carolina over voter-ID law

It’s not just Texas where Attorney General Eric Holder wants to get around the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County. The Department of Justice will announce this morning that they will file a lawsuit to block North Carolina’s voter-ID law, just as they did in Texas, and probably will in all of the former pre-clearance states that attempt to enforce one:

The U.S. Department of Justice will file a lawsuit Monday to stop North Carolina’s new voter ID law, which critics have said is the most sweeping law of its kind, according to a person briefed on the department’s plans.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who has said he will fight state voting laws that he sees as discriminatory, will announce the lawsuit at noon Monday, along with the three U.S. attorneys from the state. …

The North Carolina ID law, which was signed by Gov. Pat McCrory in August, goes into effect for the 2016 elections. It requires voters to show a valid, government-issued ID before casting a ballot. It also has a number of other provisions, which will be challenged in the federal lawsuit, according to the person briefed on the Justice Department’s plans.

Among them: the elimination of seven days of early voting; the elimination of same-day registration during early voting; the prohibition against counting provisional ballots that are cast when a voter shows up at the wrong polling place.

The suit will allege explicit discriminatory intent on the part of North Carolina’s legislature, according to ABC News:

“North Carolina enacted these provisions with a discriminatory purpose to deny African-Americans equal access to voting,” and the provisions “will have the result of denying or abridging an equal opportunity to vote for African-Americans,” the source briefed on the lawsuit said.

The source cited a report by North Carolina’s State Board of Elections four months ago, showing that while African-Americans comprise 22 percent of registered voters in North Carolina, African-Americans account for 34 percent of voters who do not have an ID issued by the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.

Governor Pat McCrory scoffed at the notion last month:

“North Carolinians overwhelmingly support a common sense law that requires voters to present photo identification in order to cast a ballot,” McCrory said in a statement last month. “Common practices like boarding an airplane and purchasing Sudafed require photo ID, and we should expect nothing less for the protection of our right to vote.”

This is yet another attempt by Holder to get around the loss of pre-clearance by forcing the courts to provide Justice a de facto pre-clearance in the courts.  However, it has less than a good chance of working, thanks to the Supreme Court’s explicit actions in Shelby County.  In all other states, Justice had to wait before suing states over voting laws to show actual damages, ie, actual and systemic discrimination rather than rational action to protect the validity of the ballot.  The court ruled this summer that the formula in the Voting Rights Act that Congress created to violate the states’ expectations of sovereignty and equal process had become irrational after 50 years.

Holder needs to wait to use those preclearance powers for Congress to come up with a new formula that allows Justice to intervene prior to actual damages, but Congress is clearly not interested in doing so.  As I have repeatedly noted, this does not prevent the DoJ from pursuing real instances of racial discrimination through Section 2 of the VRA, but it does force the DoJ to proceed as it does with the forty-plus other states by (a) waiting for the laws to take effect, and (b) bearing the burden of proof that the laws are discriminatory in intent and practice, neither of which they had to do during the pre-clearance era. Given the court’s ruling this summer, I’d bet that they will take a very dim view of Holder’s attempt to push a political strategy to reconstitute preclearance through the federal courts rather than Congress.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/30/holder-to-sue-north-carolina-over-voter-id-law/

As Crisis Unfolds, Obama Sets Personal Golf Record

As the House moved Saturday toward passing legislation that will likely result in a government shutdown, President Obama excused himself to play his customary Saturday golf, a round that set a record for most golf outings in a year since he became president.

It is perhaps emblematic of his declining influence on Capitol Hill that Obama chose not to work to affect the outcome of one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in years and instead engaged in his favorite recreational activity.

The House bill would maintain government funding only if Obamacare is delayed a year, setting up a likely government shutdown Monday at Midnight if as expected the Senate fails to agree. The White House has said Obama would veto the bill, which passed early Sunday.

Though the first year of a president’s second term is the most crucial for getting things done before lame duck status starts to set in, Obama as of Saturday has played golf golf 35 times in 2013, eclipsing the previous mark of 34 he set in 2011. And there’s still plenty of golf weather left in Washington. Meanwhile, he may well hit the links several times more once he gets to Hawaii for the Christmas holiday.

Last year, with an election to be won, Obama only played 19 times. He golfed 28 times in 2009 and 30 times in 2010.

Obama made no public remarks Saturday, leaving it to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney to issue a statement on the House bill while the White House released Obama’s his pre-recorded weekly address, which discussed his opposition to the House measure.

http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2013/09/29/crisis-unfolds-obama-sets-personal-golf-record/

"The monster speaks" – reporter interviews jailed abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell

An abortion provider from Philadelphia is spending life in prison following his first-degree murder conviction in the death of three babies.

Kermit Gosnell was called a monster for what he did, and how he did it – ending the lives of fetuses past the legal limit in Pennsylvania.

But who he is, why he did what he did, and how he got away with it for so long, remains a mystery.

"There was a lot of conjecture about what motivated Gosnell and people said he was greedy, crazy, he is a monster. I think that at bottom, he was a true believer in abortion rights," said reporter Steve Volk, the only journalist Gosnell has spoken with while in prison.

"He professed to be a deeply religious man, and I believe the depths of those beliefs enabled him to rationalize all of the other choices he made along the way," said Volk.

For the Philadelphia reporter, a big takeaway from the Gosnell story is "what can happen when a self-righteous belief in yourself, and your own authority, spirals out of control."

Volk compiled the dozens of letters, e-mails, and phone conversations he had with Gosnell into an article for Philadelphia Magazine, and an e-book, "Gosnell's Babies."

Read an excerpt from Steve Volk's article here.

Volk's reporting reveals that in addition to Gosnell being a murderer, the case was a failure of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania medical establishment.

"We will never know how many people do bear responsibility, but certainly there are a lot of them. There are a few people who try to do the right thing along the way. And then above them, it seems there was always somebody who was willing to look the other way," said Volk.

A key moment of Volk's story comes when he realizes while talking to Gosnell that he considers fetuses that have been removed and are still alive to be essentially dead because they have no hope for survival.

"He talked to me about this concept he called 'fatal blighting,'" said Volk. Gosnell would inject the fetus with a certain drug intended to stop its heart.

"Once he had done that, the baby was 'fatally blighted' and any movement it might have shown at that point would not be what he would consider a real movement," said Volk. "He sort of retreated behind this position a lot when we talked. That was one of the most disturbing parts of our conversation."

http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/25/the-monster-speaks-reporter-interviews-jailed-abortion-doctor-kermit-gosnell/

Fourth Graders Taught About ‘Pimps’ and ‘Mobstaz’ Through Common Core Curriculum—Misspellings And Ebonics Added Bonus

Definition of EBONICS

:  black english

Definition of BLACK ENGLISH

:  a nonstandard variety of English spoken by some African-Americans —called also Black English vernacular

First Known Use of BLACK ENGLISH

1968

Learn More About BLACK ENGLISH

Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about "Black English"

Browse

Next Word in the Dictionary: blackening
Previous Word in the Dictionary: blackened
All Words Near: Black English

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/black+english

Twista / Twista & The Speed Knot Mobstaz - Mobstability music CD album $12.15 in... the mafioso family-business subject matter and gangster-movie ambiance

Category

Rock/Pop Albums, R&B CDs, Rap, Urban Soundtrack, Gangsta

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Mobstability album for sale by Twista / Twista & The Speed Knot Mobstaz was released Oct 06, 1998 on the Creator's Way/Big Beat label. On MOBSTABILITY, the artist formerly known as Tung Twista brings along fellow Chicago natives the Speedknot Mobstaz to increase street credibility. Mobstability songs Reflecting their geographical position in middle America, the mob stakes out a musical middle ground between regional styles. Rump-shaking southern jeep beats, the mafioso family-business subject matter and gangster-movie ambiance (see "Crook County") of East Coast hardcore, the double-time flows and harmonic conceits of fellow midwesterners Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and the bass grooves and trebly synthesizer of L.A. G-funk are all incorporated into their sound. Mobstability CD music contains a single disc with 14 songs.   ...See Full Description

 Twista / Twista & The Speed Knot Mobstaz - Mobstability Album Track Listing

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	Trk	Song
	1	Intro
	2	Crook County
	3	Mob Up
	4	Front Porch
	5	In Your World
	6	Legit Ballers
	7	Mobstability
Additional Track Information Mobstability buy CD music
	8	Party Hoes
	9	Warm Embrace
	10	Smoke Wit You
	11	Loyalty
	12	Motive 4 Murder
	13	Dreams
	14	Rock Y'all Spot
Additional Track Information Mobstability songs http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/1001083/a/mobstability.htm

GatewayPundit previously reported here and here on Common Core promoting pornography in the classroom. Another recent report comes to light from an outraged Louisiana parent of a fourth grader who was helping her 9-year-old son with a Common Core homework reading assignment.

ourth grade students in Vermilion Parish, La. were given a homework  assignment that included words like “Po Pimp” and “mobstaz,” but school officials said the worksheet was age appropriate based on an education website affiliated with Common Core education standards.

“I try to instill values in my son,” parent Brittney Badeaux told Fox News. “My goal is for him to ultimately to become a great man, a family man, a well-rounded man. And now my son wants to know what a pimp is.”

Badeaux was helping her 9-year-old son with his homework when she heard him say the words “Po Pimp” and “mobstaz.”

“I couldn’t believe it at first – hearing him read it to me,” she told Fox  News. “So I looked at the paper and read the entire article. It was filled with  Ebonics.”

The worksheet, obtained by Fox Radio affiliate KPEL provided contextual examples of the word “twist.” It included references to tornadoes and the 1950’s dance craze – the “Twist.”

But it also included a paragraph about “Twista” – a rapper with the group Speedknot Mobstaz who performs a single titled, “Po-Pimp.”

“It was really inappropriate for my child,” Badeaux said. “He doesn’t know what a pimp or mobster is.”

She also took issue with the school sending home a worksheet that intentionally misspelled words.

“I try to teach him morals and respect and to speak correctly,” she said. “It’s hard for a fourth grader to understand Ebonics when you’re trying to teach  him how to spell and write correctly.”

Vermilion Parish School Superintendent Jerome Puyau told Fox News the “po-pimp” assignment was aligned to a fourth grade English Language Arts standard for Common Core.

“Out of context, this word is inappropriate,” Puyau said. “However, within the Common Core standards, they do want us to discuss real world texts.” [...]

Read more here.

A Rethinking Schools article on the trouble with Common Core reminds us of the following:

States were coerced into adopting the Common Core by requirements attached to the federal Race to the Top grants and, later, the No Child Left Behind waivers. (This is one reason many conservative groups opposed to any federal role in education policy oppose the Common Core.)

If time permits, Karen Bracken gives an excellent presentation on the subversive Common Core threat to education at a Chattanooga Tea Party meeting held on April 18, 2013:

AP: For all of Obama’s “recovery” blather, the poverty rate isn’t budging

After his bizarre and widely panned decision to go forward with it just hours after the Navy Yard shooting on Monday, President Obama gave yet another speech about how much the economy has ostensibly recovered since the financial crisis five years ago. His administration has been “pushing back against the trends that have been battering the middle class for decades,” he insisted, citing the supposedly healing housing market, the “saved” auto industry, limited job creation, and increased renewable energy generation as evidence that his policies are working, but was mindful that “as any middle-class family will tell you, or anybody who’s striving to get into the middle class, we are not yet where we need to be.”

Yes, it’s all very interesting and compelling, I’m sure, except that by far too many measures, the middle class has only been faring worse and worse during Obama’s presidency. Real median incomes were higher in 1989 than they were in 2012; the smallest percentage of Americans are working today since the record low of only 63.2 percent in 1978; and despite all of Obama’s talk about improvement and progress, the poverty rate was again stuck at an inexcusable 15 percent last year, via the AP:

The nation’s poverty rate remained stuck at 15 percent last year despite America’s slowly reviving economy, a discouraging lack of improvement for the record 46.5 million poor and an unwelcome benchmark for President Barack Obama’s recovery plans.

More than 1 in 7 Americans were living in poverty, not statistically different from the 46.2 million of 2011 and the sixth straight year the rate had failed to improve, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. Median income for the nation’s households was $51,017, also unchanged from the previous year after two consecutive annual declines, while the share of people without health insurance did improve but only a bit, from 15.7 percent to 15.4 percent. …

The Census Bureau’s annual report offers a snapshot of the economic well-being of U.S. households for 2012, when the unemployment rate averaged 8.1 percent after reaching an average high of 9.6 percent in 2010. Typically, the poverty rate tends to move in a similar direction as the unemployment rate, so many analysts had been expecting a modest decline in poverty.

The latest census data show that the gap between rich and poor was largely unchanged over the past year, having widened since 2007 to historic highs.

No, the poverty rate wouldn’t tend to improve if the drop in unemployment only really signaled a mass exodus from the work force, would it?

As ever, President Obama and fellow progressive populists’ big defenses are that, A) Republicans obviously don’t care about poverty and are willfully obstructing the president’s glorious agenda out of pure spite, and B) that there have been economic gains, but that they’re mysteriously only going to the upper one or two percent of the oh-so-exploitative upper class. Republicans actually “want to accelerate” income-inequality trends, Obama insisted the other day — so it’s weird, then, that President Obama’s policies have been the very cause lately exacerbating income inequality and the stagnation and shrinkage of middle-class incomes:

The poor economic policies of the past few years is a reasonable explanation for today’s weak economy. Fiscal policy has at best provided temporary stimulus before fading away with no sustainable impact on growth. More costly and confusing regulations—including the many mandates in the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act—have reduced the willingness of firms to invest and hire. The Federal Reserve has employed a variety of unconventional and unpredictable monetary policies with not very successful results.

The administration and its supporters are not about to blame the slow recovery on its own policies, or those of the Fed. Instead, President Obama and his supporters have been talking about “an economy that grows from the middle out,” as he put it in Galesburg, Ill., in July. The fashionable middle-out view blames today’s troubles on policies that took root in Ronald Reagan’s administration. …

Moreover, data do not support the view that tax cuts in the past 30 years are responsible for the widening income distribution. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the distribution of market income before taxes widened in the 1980s and ’90s by about as much as the distribution of income after taxes. …

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/18/ap-for-all-of-obamas-recovery-blather-the-poverty-rate-isnt-budging/

Is Obama's incompetence by design?

Not since Jimmy Carter's mishandling of Iran in 1979 have we seen such an ineffective, feckless and incompetent foreign policy from the White House. But Barack Obama's "strategy" over the past weeks in dealing with the Syrian crises stretches the boundaries of stupidity and naivety in foreign policy. ...or was it by design? Obamacare is starting to kick in; by January of 2014 many of the components will be falling in place. At this point, however, entire industries, Unions, government workers are scurrying like rats on the Titanic, trying to jump ship on the impending disaster. The entire health care industry, once the pride of the world, is threatened with a complete implosion and collapse. How could this happen? ...or was this by design? We are nearly $17 trillion in debt, we have unpaid liabilities that even our grandchildren and great grandchildren won't be able to pay. Every American "owes" the federal government over $188,000 on this debt. There is no more debate on whether or not the system can sustain itself; we are on the edge of the fiscal cliff, ready to fall over. ...was this by design, too? Many conservative experts will debate on the nature of his policies, his recklessness and nativity. They may be right. But what if this was the plan all along, consciously or otherwise? What if Obama wants to diminish our role in the world, what if he is pushing us toward an economic collapse in order to take over more control over the economy? Was Obamacare a ruse in order for the government to fully nationalize what will be a collapsing system? How would we know and what is the motivation behind Obama? There is no one in America today that understands the Left and the motivations behind Barack Obama better than my team of writers here at the Center. We lived that side of the Left, it was our world. Today it is Obama's world.

House Oversight: State Dept obstructed Benghazi probe

Just five days after the one-year anniversary of the attack on our consulate in Benghazi and the murder of a US ambassador and three other Americans, the House Oversight Committee has raised the stakes on the public debate over accountability for the collapse.  A new report from Oversight accuses the State Department of willfully obstructing the Congressional investigation into the attack and the actions of the Obama administration before, during, and after the sacking of the consulate.  As The Hill notes, the report also accuses the Accountability Review Board of obstruction and participating in a softball attempt to sweep the scandal under the proverbial rug:

The State Department willfully obstructed a congressional investigation of the deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi last year, according to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

State Department officials routinely refused requests for documents on its investigation into the September, 2012, attack, including interview transcripts and summaries of eyewitnesses to the attack, according to a committee report obtained by The Hill.

Additionally, members of the independent Accountability Review Board (ARB) tasked with reviewing the events that led up to the Benghazi attack were rife with “actual and perceived conflicts of interest” with State, the House report adds.

“The State Department’s refusal to turn over ARB documents has made an independent evaluation of the ARB’s review difficult,” according to the report.

To that end, ARB members failed to “record or transcribe the interviews it conducted” and refuses to hand over summaries of the interviews, it adds.

Oversight subpoenaed these materials to investigate the issue on its own, as Congress has both a right and a duty to do.  The State Department refused to intercede with the ARB, in part by arguing that the panel was independent of the State Department.  However, as the report notes, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commissioned the ARB as required by law, specifically “the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and
Antiterrorism Act of 1986 (the Act), which states that “in any case of serious injury, loss of life,
or significant destruction of property at, or related to, a United States Government mission
abroad . . . the Secretary of State shall convene an Accountability Review Board.” The Benghazi ARB was the nineteenth Accountability Review Board held since 1988.  While an ARB is supposed to be “thorough and independent,” according to the law, it still exists within the aegis of State, and a permanent ARB staff officer remains in State to serve as the “institutional memory” of the investigation.

State argues, however, that the ARB exists in the same kind of sphere as an Inspector General.  Oversight found itself less than impressed by that argument:

Furthermore, the State Department’s attempts to characterize the ARB as independent have proven to be inconsistent with the Department’s action in response to the congressional investigation of the Benghazi attacks. In refusing to produce ARB materials subpoenaed by the Committee, the State Department has sought to compare the ARB to “analogous investigative bodies such as Offices of Inspectors General.” If an Inspector General, however, encouraged agency leaders to prevent a witness from testifying before Congress because that witness’s testimony could reflect poorly on the Department, the Inspector General’s credibility would be greatly diminished. An ARB should be held to the same standard, if the State Department is to use the community of Inspectors General as a point of reference.

More to the point, though, why is State making excuses for not cooperating with Oversight?  If the Benghazi debacle was as straightforward as the White House claims, then these materials should have been turned over with alacrity.  Instead, State has dragged its heels or worse, while the ARB acts to protect State from investigation.  Meanwhile, even the few low-level staffers disciplined over the failure have returned to work with no explanation as to how accountability got served by the State Department’s internal investigation.

In a sadly-related note, TPM reports that State didn’t even bother to mark the anniversary with an official commemoration of the four Americans who died in the line of duty.  Instead, Foggy Bottom employees had to organize a memorial on their own:

Staffers at State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. held their own private ceremony Wednesday to commemorate the first anniversary of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya after finding out the agency would not be organizing a formal, official memorial service.

The Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack left four people dead, including the American Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and Sean Smith, an information management officer in the department’s foreign service.

A State Department staffer who worked with Stevens in Libya and asked not to be named told TPM there were about 20 to 25 staffers at the memorial. The informal gathering was put together after staffers inquired and learned the department would not be holding an official event to mark the anniversary.

Secretary of State John Kerry sent out a broadcast e-mail noting the anniversary, but that was the end of official recognition of the first anniversary of Benghazi.  This seems to still be the motto at State:

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/16/house-oversight-state-dept-obstructed-benghazi-probe/