02/03/15 – Kelly Riddell – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest today is Kelly Riddell.
She's co-author with Jeffrey Scott Shapiro at The Washington Times of this very important three-part series about Hillary Clinton and the Libya War.
The first one is now titled, Secret Tapes Undermine Hillary Clinton on Libyan War.
Welcome to the show, Kelly.
How are you doing?
Good.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Thrilled to see this journalism here.
Great piece of work that you guys put together here about how we got into the war in Libya back in 2011.
First of all, I guess, you know, the most important point is in the former headline.
It's still in the URL.
She was undercut, not by the tapes.
She's not undermined by the tapes.
She was undermined by the Pentagon trying to stop her from getting us into the war in Libya.
And I guess it was already known that Robert Gates had advised against it.
But I don't think we had any idea of just how hard the Pentagon tried to thwart her ambition here.
Can you tell us, first of all, I guess, about what you know about Mullen and Ham?
Mullen was the head of CENTCOM, pardon me, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Ham was the head of AFRICOM at the time.
Can you tell us about their concerns here?
Well, I mean, their concerns were that no U.S. national interests were at stake, and they couldn't see in terms of the civil war that had broke out in Libya.
They didn't know who the rebels were or if they were terrorists, if they had connections to al-Qaeda, who they were to cut a deal with.
So they knew Muammar Gaddafi.
They knew that he was a bad guy.
But they also knew that he was helping the CIA collect a lot of counterterrorism intelligence.
He was keeping a list of al-Qaeda operatives, and he was really becoming a strategic asset for our intelligence communities.
So they knew if he was unseated or gone, that that intel would be lost.
But not only that, but then who would come in to take his place?
They were unsure about what would transpire if he was removed.
And so they advised Secretary Clinton at the time, as well as the president, to stay out of the conflict, to let it resolve itself.
And we know from the intelligence that was gathered that Muammar Gaddafi was about to regain stability of his country, about to regain control of the country.
And that would have happened had NATO not started bombing, had not started airstrikes.
But, you know, Admiral Mullen was so concerned about this that, I mean, they gave their public statements around March 15th when the policy decisions were being made.
But shortly thereafter, around March 20th, you know, General Ham was approached by the regime, generals in the regime, to negotiate a 72-hour truce, a ceasefire, that he took authority on himself to do.
And that was shot down by the State Department.
And then we know that the Joint Chiefs team opened up a direct channel to Muammar Gaddafi's son, Fais Gaddafi, in an effort to try to transition him to be the next leader of Libya, all, you know, outside of what the State Department was doing at the time.
Well, it's interesting here that, well, there's so many interesting things here.
One of them is, as far as the original motive, I remember back at the time interviewing someone from Amnesty International saying, oh, yes, it's all true.
Gaddafi's just mass murdering all of these people all over the place.
He's bombing every protest from the air with airstrikes and all these things.
And yet you guys quote Human Rights Watch, who, I guess, weren't on contract for the State Department at the moment, saying, well, you know, it's all kind of overblown and better reaffirming what was my assumption in the first place, which I think has been borne out by Michael Hastings' reporting and now further by yours, that what Hillary Clinton was really interested in here more than anything was a PR stunt, because after Tunisia and especially after Egypt, it looked really bad that America had been backing this fascist dictator, the military dictator of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, who Hillary Clinton had called her family friend and who she tried to prop up and keep in power as long as she possibly could.
And then when he finally was overthrown anyway, she realized, oh, no, Uncle Sam looks really bad here.
So we need to try to pretend like we're on the side of the little guy against the dictators.
And so they stabbed Gaddafi in the back who they brought in from the cold in 2003.
But he was, you know, no Mubarak, I guess he was expendable to them.
So she decided to back the rebels against him, sort of like in this cartoon character cartoon of, you know, America on the side of the poor rebels against the evil dictator, even though, as you guys describe here, the poor rebels were a bunch of veterans of the Iraq war where they fought with Zarqawi, the Libyan Islamic fighting group of, you know, al Qaeda and Iraq veterans.
Yeah, I mean, I think you make two very good points here.
The first in that the humanitarian crisis was overblown.
And that is what led the U.S. to sign the U.N. resolution.
The resolution was based on the imminent humanitarian crisis.
And we have proved that there was no imminent humanitarian crisis, that given we've been briefed by intelligence, and they knew at the time that there was 400 people, insurgents that were killed in the Civil War, and that they had no population estimates of how many people were in the city of Benghazi, which they were worried would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
When we asked intelligence directly, were you concerned that this was going to be another Rwanda-like scenario, which Hillary Clinton stated was going to happen had we not gotten involved?
They simply said, no, this was nothing like Rwanda.
So, so you have to be specific here.
You guys quote the military saying Gaddafi only had 2000 men.
Susan Rice was telling the United Nations that he had given his army, some giant army, armed them with guns and Viagra.
And they were raping their way across all of Libya, and they were going to murder every last man, woman and child in Benghazi.
Obama said this would be like killing everyone in Charlotte, North Carolina.
And yet he had 2000 men to accomplish this with, huh?
Yeah.
And and if you look at the map of Libya, he was marching his way from Tripoli to Benghazi, which was the rebel stronghold, and on his way on on his troops march to through the cities to to Benghazi, they weren't they were sparsely populated.
They were mostly, you know, oil ports or people had evacuated.
So the fact that you know, there was like all of this, that's that's untrue.
And that's misleading.
And that's what we were told by the US military that they had been keeping an eye on it.
But, but, you know, he was he was really on a post in this march forward, because the civilians had either fled, or had had joined the side of the regime.
And in that there was no, there was no populist strongholds, really, until you know, until you got to Benghazi.
And I know you guys couldn't cover everything in this series here.
But it seems important as far as the precedent set for what's a good enough excuse to start a war about a crisis that's taking place wholly within the borders of a sovereign state, and member of the UN.
In the case of the Kosovo war, there was, you know, Kosovo was kind of de facto separate from Serbia by then anyway, kind of in a way and plus, Bill and Hillary lied that 100,000 men, women and children had already been murdered.
Now, it wasn't true.
But they said, Look, there are 100,000 dead civilians.
So we have to intervene.
In this case, it was wholly hypothetical.
And so therefore, Kelly, you can't prove it's not true either, right?
Because hey, there could have been a massacre.
And now we have that as the standard for when the President can get America involved in a kinetic action without the consent of Congress totally in violation of the War Powers Act, based on Hillary's imagination, the Secretary of State's imagination.
And that is exactly what concerns a lot of people that we interviewed.
I mean, and that's why you see you we went to the different embassies and got foreign reaction.
And that's why you see countries like Russia and Brazil, that they abstained from the UN vote, because they were worried that, you know, if they if they voted for it, then war could be justified in any sorts of means.
Given this liberal interpretation.
I spoke with Senator Rand Paul, that thought right there.
We'll pick this up on the other side with Kelly Riddell from the Washington Times, this great series, you got to go read it all about Hillary getting us into the war in Libya.
We'll be right back.
Hey, I'll sky here.
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OK, OK.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Kelly Riddell.
She's the co-author of this series at The Washington Times.
First is exclusive secret tapes undermine Hillary Clinton on Libyan war.
Second is Hillary Clinton's WMD moment.
U.S. intelligence saw false narrative in Libya.
And third, secret Benghazi report reveals Hillary's Libya war push armed al-Qaeda tied terrorists.
And then there's a sidebar.
Listen to the audio tapes of Denis Kucinich and the Pentagon explaining what was going on here as the Pentagon tried to stop the rush to war.
And I'm sorry, I forget if it was your piece or not.
I know Josh Rogin had a piece that I found from back in 2011 where he talked about they had a big fight on, I guess, sitting there on the couches in the Oval Office.
And it was the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the national security advisor and his deputy lined up against the war.
And then and then the activists were for it.
And the president sided with with Rice Power and Hillary Clinton over the Pentagon, saying that there was a war that they did not want to partake in.
Incredible.
That is that is exactly that is exactly true.
I mean, this was very much advocated by, you know, Secretary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, all arguing on behalf that they didn't want another Rwanda to happen.
They didn't want enough to see another genocide take place on their watch.
And if you look at Samantha Power, I mean, she wrote she wrote an entire book on the Rwanda genocide and felt very passionate about that.
And from what we heard from people that were in that meeting, it was very it was emotionally driven.
It was an emotionally based argument that took precedent over the facts of the matter and the situation, the real time intelligence and situation on the ground.
Well, and then especially when you're talking about the military has got Gaddafi talking about a deal where he will step down if they will only promise him safe passage.
He will leave power, he will negotiate, he will allow African Union troops to come and stand between him and his enemies in order to enforce the ceasefire.
Not good enough.
Hillary Clinton had General Ham call off the negotiations at that point.
You know, and and it was when when we asked the military, you know, why was this called off?
Why?
You know, why do you why do you think the State Department rejected this?
They basically said that, you know, at that point, it was they had come too far.
It was that they needed to save face.
It became a face saving measurement almost, you know, because if we were to call call everything off, you know, then it would have made the State Department and the White House look bad.
Like why did we go in there the whole time?
So then the whole thing became regime change.
That's what the generals told you.
The military men told you?
Yeah.
And you can't you can't have you can't have you can't have a regime change by, you know, basically by basically keeping in power the Gaddafi regime, which was which was going to happen.
They were thinking that safe Gaddafi would take the reins from his father.
And his father would would the Gaddafis also were very clear that they were not going to leave Libya, that they would stay there.
I mean, that's where they were.
That's that was their their their nation and they weren't going to leave.
But but but Momar would step down.
But that that wasn't good enough.
That was going to you know, that basically at the time and as far as the rhetoric had ramped up to such a point where, you know, we couldn't accept those those terms.
And now can you tell us which general or officer who was that told you that that that was really the reason was saving face at that point?
You know, all of our all of our conversations with the military and intelligence community, you know, we can't reveal who we spoke with for fear of retaliation.
A lot of them hold the current positions that, you know, spoke to us only on the condition of anonymity.
Sure.
Yeah.
I wasn't sure if that was a name source or not, but worth a try there.
And now.
So there's a major intelligence crisis kind of going on here, too.
You guys compare it to the WMD.
But we have first of all, it's basically a hoax.
The military doesn't believe at all that all these civilians are about to be killed.
One hundred thousand of them, as the president ended up claiming.
But at the same time, too, they're saying that, hey, these are a bunch of jihadists are basically the armed rebels to back here.
And are we sure we want to do this?
And then but they were and I'm kind of confused about this point, Kelly.
It sounds like you have them saying how how frustrated they are that they aren't able to get this information to the president, that somehow these generals, these guys have to go through Hillary, but they don't.
They have Robert Gates and they have Admiral Mullen on their side.
And so why did they feel so stymied as far as actually getting real information to the president before he made the decision?
I feel that that is that that is an inherent conflict with the military, that they're not policy guys.
They are strategy guys.
And they are you know, once the orders have been given, they are on board with that mission.
And to say that they're not on board makes them appear.
It's not it's not their directive right there at the directive of the United States president and the orders that he gives them they need to follow.
And so when they were saying that they didn't quite trust what was coming, what what Clinton was providing to the White House, and they were that was for their own internal strategy.
And and because they didn't know, to be quite frank, they didn't know what the end terms or what the end result was going to look like, if the National Transition Council would become the, you know, would become the, the, the government or, or what was going to happen in Libya or what the US strategy was going to be in Libya after Qaddafi was removed.
And the president hadn't articulated that and neither had the State Department.
So they were kind of trying to think stay ahead of it and try to think on their feet and develop strategies for what in different scenarios of what might play out for in their own best interest, because they knew that they would be called upon then to execute whatever strategies, but they were, it was kind of, they didn't know what their exact directives were.
So they were just coming up with all these different scenario plannings as to when they were called upon that they'd have different options to pursue.
And now I'm sorry for jumping around, but back to the Rwanda thing for a minute here.
It kind of strikes me that it's sort of policy by analogy that, well, you know, here's the thing that happened one time and this is like that, but I can see how that could be part of an argument.
But of course, when you're deciding about something like this, Libya is not Rwanda.
In fact, it's a lot more like Iraq, come to think about it.
If even just looking at it on a map, it's a little bit more like Iraq than Rwanda.
And it seems like that must have played into the conversation here about even Hillary at the time and Obama at the time both said, hey, we have to be very cautious because who knows what might happen when we're done before they did it anyway.
Yeah.
I think another thing to, to when you're, when you're making a genocide comparison like that of Rwanda or, you know, or any, is the timeline.
What happened in Rwanda didn't happen over the course of one or two days.
It was over a hundred day period.
And, and what the president and what the secretary of state was arguing at the time, if we don't get involved in these, these next few days, you know, there's going to be a massive genocide.
And that, if you look in the history of genocide, that's just, you, I mean, the killings of hundreds of thousands of people doesn't happen in a 48 hour time span.
That's just unrealistic.
So that's unreasonable just on the face of things.
And now, so did you guys get much of a temperature on how it was that Obama actually decided to choose the Hillary position when, I mean, I know he's a Democrat and he has to act extra tough and all that, but then again, he's got his right flank entirely covered.
He's got a Republican secretary of defense saying, don't do it.
And he chooses to do it anyway.
Did they tell you much about, you know, like you talked about, you had sources at that meeting, what he said about this, how he decided to go for this?
Well, I think, and this is from, you know, some expert sources outside of the military that said, you know, at the time, if you take it in historical context and you said, you brought up the Arab Spring and how we were caught flat footed there.
And, and the president also in the 2011 time period was, was looked upon as a weak in foreign policy and kind of as weak within the military.
And him and Ben Rhodes had come up with this concept, this idea of leading from behind.
And I think what we've been told from, you know, military, from experts that have analyzed this period is that he saw this as a perfect vehicle to test out this lead from behind theory in that, that he would take action with the UN, it'd be NATO backed, the US would go into the first two weeks with the military, but then they pass it along to NATO, something that's been unprecedented in, in, in US history or kind of warfare history.
And then it'd be a perfect example and execution of this theory that he could define his foreign strategy on.
So it was very political for him.
Yeah.
And it's right the same year, we're finally pulling out of Iraq too.
So it's a little bit of cover for that.
Maybe politically wise.
I mean, anyway, great reporting.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today.
Thank you.
That's Kelly Riddell.
Y'all.
She's at the Washington times.
Great three-part series on Hillary and Libya.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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