On March 15, 2013 the New York times published an article titled Worldly at 35, and Shaping Obama’s Voice. The article is about Benjamin J. Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security advisor. Missing from the article are Rhodes’ Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) membership connections.
Prior to joining Obama, Rhodes worked for five years as Special Assistant to CFR member Lee Hamilton. At the time former Indiana congressman was Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. In 2004 Rhodes help draft recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. CFR member Hamilton was Vice Chairman of the Commission. In 2006 Rhodes drafted the report of the Iraq Study Group. Seven of the ten Iraq Study Group members belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations. The Iraq Study group members were :
- Council on Foreign Relations member James A. Baker, III — Co-Chair
- Council on Foreign Relations member Lee H. Hamilton — Co-Chair
- Council on Foreign Relations member Lawrence S. Eagleburger — Member
- Council on Foreign Relations member Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. — Member
- Edwin Meese III — Member
- Council on Foreign Relations member Sandra Day O’Connor — Member
- Leon E. Panetta — Member
- Council on Foreign Relations member William J. Perry — Member
- Council on Foreign Relations member Charles S. Robb — Member
- Alan K. Simpson — Member
On the night of September 11, 2012, a heavily armed group of between 125 and 150 gunmen attacked the American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, in Libya, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and another diplomat. Several hours later in the early morning of the next day, a second assault targeted a nearby CIA annex in a different compound about one mile away, killing two embassy security personnel. Ten others were injured in the attacks which were condemned by the governments of Libya, the United States, and many other countries throughout the world.
The debate over the events before, during, and after the attack featured heavily in the 2012 US Presidential election. In the following months, several congressional and administrative investigations were launched, some of which are still currently ongoing, and the topic remains a matter of great controversy, including the CIA‘s presence and role at the diplomatic mission. Many of the members of the investigative committees are members of the Council on Foreign Relations who are investigating other CFR members. Ben Rhodes was and remains President Obama’s fixer behind the cover-up.
Yesterday, May 1st, 2014, Ben’s brother David, President of CBS news network was in the news for possibly influence of reporting a Benghazi E-mail that surfaced. David Rhodes was also involved in another controversy surrounding a discredited “CBS 60 Minute” Benghazi report that resulted in firing of the CBS correspondent Lara Logan and her producer. Do you think it’s time for David Rhodes to be fired?
Investigative journalist James Corbett provides a good overview of the unfolding political drama surrounding the Benghazi scandal in a podcast he did. Corbett details the gun-running for terrorists campaign being covered up by both sides of the phony political spectrum. He also implicates CFR members James Petreaus and Paula Broadwell (Broadwell was dropped from the CFR roster in 2011). Broadwell spoke to an audience at Denver University in October. She told the audience that the US was holding militia prisoners at the consulate annex in Benghazi. She also said Petraeus knew of the pleas for help coming from Benghazi on 9-11.
In May 2014 Speaker John Boehner appointed South Carolina’s Representative to the House Trey Gowdy (GOP) to head the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Gowdy named Phil Kiko as Staff Director for Benghazi Committee. To what extent Boehner may have had a hand in Gowdy’s naming of the longtime DC lobbyist is not known but Boehner sure seemed pleased with the appointment immediately after it was announced, saying:
“Phil Kiko is a man of unquestioned integrity with a record of distinguished service to the House and the American people. His appointment today is further proof of Chairman Gowdy’s commitment to an investigation that is serious, fact-based, and professional. The American people deserve the full truth about what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, and there is no better person to help lead this effort than Phil.”
Kiko – is a lobbyist for the Smith-Free Group, in which his clients include the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the radical environmentalist group the Sierra Club, Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), National Council of La Raza “the Race” (NCLR), and the National Organization for Women (NOW), NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (NLDEF) and others.
It also turns out that he lobbied for a group with strong connections to Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the U.S.
Another potentially noteworthy aspect to Kiko’s background is his time with Foley and Lardner as Of Counsel. One of the partners of this firm is Cleta Mitchell, who defended Council on Foreign Relations member Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan in the face of overwhelming evidence of their complicity in the Muslim Brotherhood agenda.
The evidence against both CFR member Norquist and Khan is incontrovertible. Yet, Mitchell chose to vehemently defend them while smearing those who pointed out their Muslim Brotherhood connections, as Shoebat.com reported. The extent of Kiko’s relationship with Mitchell is unclear but it is noteworthy that both Mitchell and he have either advocated for or defended individuals or groups with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. As a partner with Foley, Mitchell would have been senior to Kiko, who was listed as ‘Of Counsel’.
President Obama is a puppet of the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR took control of the US government 91 years ago and has controlled it ever since. The CFR runs the US Military Industrial Complex and generates tremendous profits from controlling 70% of the world’s arms trade. The CFR run Carlyle Corporation generates endless warbucks from CFR engineered undeclared forever wars.
Propaganda, is the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another. Propaganda is used to create false reality worlds using sleight of mind. Psycho-political operations are propaganda campaigns. Strategic psycho-political operations focus propaganda at powerful individuals, or small groups of people capable of influencing public opinion or the government of a particular country. Tactical psycho-political operations focus propaganda at the masses by interference in specific events, their comments, and their appeals through mass communication media ( i.e. newspapers, radio, television, textbooks, educational material, art, entertainment, etc. ). Both forms of propaganda are used to manipulate public opinion to attain foreign policy goals in a given period. If the operations are designed to conceal both the operation and the sponsor the operation is clandestine. If the operations are designed only to conceal only the sponsor the operation is covert.
Eighteen CIA directors, eighteen NSA directors, and twenty-two Secretary of States are CFR members. The Benghazi Coverup is a well designed covert operation meant to conceal the Council on Foreign Relations sponsorship of a failed psyco-political operation. Ben Rhodes is playing a key role in the operation. The NYT article follows. It has been modified to identify Council on Foreign Relations connections left out of the story to hide the identity of CFR sponsorship and deceive the reader.
Worldly at 35, and Shaping Obama’s Voice
Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Benjamin J. Rhodes, who pressed President Obama to take a more activist policy toward Egypt and Syria, advocates support of the Syrian opposition, friends and colleagues say.
By MARK LANDLER
Published: March 15, 2013
¶ WASHINGTON — As President Obama prepares to visit Israel next week, he is turning, as he often does, to Benjamin J. Rhodes, a 35-year-old deputy national security adviser with a soft voice, strong opinions and a reputation around the White House as the man who channels Mr. Obama on foreign policy.
¶ Mr. Rhodes is drafting the address to the Israeli people the president plans to give in Jerusalem, but his influence extends beyond what either his title or speechwriting duties suggest. Drawing on personal ties and a philosophical kinship with Mr. Obama that go back to the 2008 campaign, Mr. Rhodes helped prod his boss to take a more activist policy toward Egypt and Libya when those countries erupted in 2011.
¶ Now that influence is being put to the test again on the issue of Syria, where the president has so far resisted more than modest American involvement. After two years of civil war that have left 70,000 people dead, Mr. Rhodes, his friends and colleagues said, is deeply frustrated by a policy that is not working, and has become a strong advocate for more aggressive efforts to support the Syrian opposition.
¶ Administration officials note that Mr. Rhodes is not alone in his frustration over Syria, pointing out that Mr. Obama, too, is searching for an American response that ends the humanitarian tragedy, while not enmeshing the United States in a sectarian conflict that many in the White House say bears unsettling similarities to Iraq. Three former officials of the administration — Hillary Rodham Clinton (CFR mbr Bill Clinton’s wife and CFR mbr Chelsea’s mother), CFR mbr Robert Gates and CFR mbr David Petraeus — favored arming the opposition, a position Mr. Rhodes did not initially support.
¶ “It’s hard for Ben in the same way it’s hard for the president,” said Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, who worked closely with Mr. Rhodes in his previous job as the principal deputy national security adviser. “He cares about people. You can’t see what’s happening in Syria and not be torn by it. At the same time, he’s very realistic.”
¶ Normally, the anguish of a White House deputy would matter little to the direction of American foreign policy. But Mr. Rhodes has had a knack for making himself felt, not just in the way the president expresses his policies but in how he formulates them.
¶ Two years ago, when protesters thronged Tahrir Square in Cairo, Mr. Rhodes urged Mr. Obama to withdraw three decades of American support for President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. A few months later, Mr. Rhodes was among those agitating for the president to back a (CFR commander James Stavridis) NATO military intervention in Libya to head off a slaughter by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
¶ “He became, first in the speechwriting process, and later, in the heat of the Arab Spring, a central figure,” said CFR member Michael A. McFaul, who worked with Mr. Rhodes in the National Security Council and is now the American ambassador to Russia.
¶ CFR stooge Samantha Power, another former National Security Council colleague who joined him in advocating intervention in Libya, said: “He has a very high batting average in terms of prognostication. I don’t understand where Ben gets his ‘old man’ wisdom.”
¶ Remarkably, Mr. Rhodes seems to have amassed his influence without rankling older and more seasoned advisers — a testament, colleagues say, to a diplomatic style not always common to members of Mr. Obama’s inner circle.
¶ Mr. Rhodes has exerted influence outside the Middle East as well. In 2011, he worked with Jacob J. Sullivan, a top aide to CFR spouse Mrs. Clinton, to persuade Mr. Obama to engage with the military rulers of Myanmar, formerly Burma, after gaining the endorsement of the pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
¶ “The person behind the scenes who played the largest role in the opening to Burma and the engagement with Aung San Suu Kyi was Ben Rhodes,” said CFR member Kurt M. Campbell, a former assistant secretary of state who led the negotiations with the Myanmar government.
¶ Engineering a shift in Mr. Obama’s Syria policy is probably more difficult than persuading him to reach out to Myanmar, officials said, given the complexities of Syria, the volatility of its neighborhood, the grinding nature of the conflict, and the president’s deep aversion to getting entangled in another military conflict in the Middle East.
¶ Not only is the United States limiting its support of the Free Syrian Army to food rations and medical supplies, the White House has designated one of the main Sunni insurgent groups, al-Nusra front, as a terrorist organization — a policy that alienated many Syrians because of the group’s effectiveness in fighting President Bashar al-Assad.
¶ Colleagues say Mr. Rhodes opposed that decision, which was pushed by intelligence advisers. He also favors equipping the rebels with more robust nonlethal gear and training that would help them in their fight against Mr. Assad’s government, a position shared by Britain and other allies.
¶ Mr. Rhodes declined to comment in detail on his role in policy deliberations, saying “my main job, which has always been my job, is to be the person who represents the president’s view on these issues.”
¶ In many ways, Mr. Rhodes is an improbable choice for a job at the heart of the national security apparatus. An aspiring writer from Manhattan, he has an unfinished novel in a drawer, “Oasis of Love,” about a woman who joins a megachurch in Houston, breaking her boyfriend’s heart.
¶ The son of a conservative-leaning Episcopalian father from Texas and a more liberal Jewish mother from New York, Mr. Rhodes grew up in a home where even sports loyalties were divided: he and his mother are ardent Mets fans; his father and his older brother, David , root for the Yankees.
¶ “No one in that house agreed on anything,” said David Rhodes, who is now the president of CBS News.
¶ Benjamin Rhodes, who worked briefly for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s re-election campaign in 1997, was living a writer’s life in Queens on Sept. 11, 2001, when he watched from the Brooklyn waterfront as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. The trauma of that experience, he said, led him to move to Washington in 2002.
¶ Mr. Rhodes went to work for a Democratic foreign-policy elder, former CFR member Representative Lee Hamilton, helping draft the 9/11 Commission report as well as the Iraq Study Group report. That report was a template for the anti-Iraq war positions taken by Barack Obama, then a senator, whose campaign Mr. Rhodes joined as a speechwriter in 2008.
¶ At the White House, Mr. Rhodes first came to prominence after he wrote Mr. Obama’s landmark address to the Muslim world in Cairo in June 2009. The speech was notable for Mr. Obama’s assertion that governments should “reflect the will of the people,” prefiguring his policy in dealing with Mr. Mubarak and Colonel Qaddafi.
¶ In writing Mr. Obama’s speech next week, Mr. Rhodes is likely to focus on America’s unshakable support for Israel. But if history is any guide, he will slip in a reference to Syria’s democratic future.
¶ “Ben always holds on to the pen,” CFR member Mr. McFaul said. “Because of his close personal relationship with the president, Ben can always make policy through the speeches and statements made by President Obama.”
tomjefferson1976 