From Benghazi to nuclear terrorism

Exclusive: Former communist spy chief Ion Mihai Pacepa nails  worst Obama scandal

Lt.  Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa

Of all the scandals currently plaguing the Obama administration, the  unprecedented and Soviet-esque politicization of the IRS has aroused the  greatest popular outrage, because many people have felt the IRS arrogance on  their own skin.

However, far more significant is the cover-up of the barbaric assassination  of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three of his subordinates inside our  diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, carried out on the symbolic date of Sept.  11.

Why do I say that? In my former life as a Soviet bloc spy chief, I spent  years observing from a unique vantage point how one kind of evil quickly leads  to another much greater evil. I believe Benghazi is the scandal of the Obama presidency.

To over-simplify: By misrepresenting that carefully prepared act of war  against the U.S. as a case of “spontaneous violence,” this administration proved  it is neither willing nor able to defend our country and our lives against  foreign terrorism, which – and here’s the critical part – is now very close to  having nuclear weapons to hurl at us.

Former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey just published  an article in the Wall Street Journal documenting how the U.S. has become so  vulnerable to international terrorism that even the ridiculous government of  North Korea could now detonate a small nuclear weapon above the American  homeland.

“North Korea needs only one ICBM capable of delivering a single nuclear  warhead in order to pose an existential threat to the U.S.,” wrote Woolsey,  along with co-author Peter Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National  and Homeland Security. “The Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse Commission, the  Congressional Strategic Posture Commission and several other U.S. government  studies have established that detonating a nuclear weapon high above any part of  the U.S. mainland would generate a catastrophic electromagnetic pulse.”

This one explosion – something North Korea is actually capable of causing –  would constitute an EMP attack that would, in the words of our former CIA chief,  “collapse the electric grid and other infrastructure that depends on it –  communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water – necessary  to sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans.”

Another well-informed analysis,  just published in the Weekly Standard, confirms that by mid-2014, the  fanatically anti-American terrorist government of Iran will likely be able to  enrich uranium to weapons-grade plutonium too rapidly for the U.S. to stop it  militarily. When an insane and metastatic regime – one obsessed with destruction  of (first) the “Little Satan,” Israel, and (later) the “Great Satan,” America –  has a nuclear arsenal, we will be living in a very different and dark world  indeed.

Back when I was national security adviser to the president of communist  Romania, one of my top tasks, ironically, was preventing terrorism. Of  course, prevention was much easier in such a ruthless dictatorship where the  political police enjoyed unlimited power. Nevertheless, recent experience proves  prevention works perfectly well in the U.S. The Heritage Foundation reported  back in 2008 that some 40 different terrorist attacks had been foiled since  Sept. 11, 2001.

Unfortunately, in 2009, for reasons about which we can only speculate, the  Obama administration jettisoned the “war on terror” from its vocabulary,  re-classified a successful terror attack on the American homeland (Fort Hood) as  “workplace violence” and abandoned many of the measures adopted after 9/11 to  prevent future terrorism. As Washington  Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen noted: “On his second day in office Obama  shut down the CIA’s high-value interrogation program. … In a speech at the  National Archives, Obama eviscerated the men and women of the CIA, accusing them  of ‘torture’ and declaring that their work ‘did not advance our war and  counterterrorism efforts – they undermined them.’”

Fast-forward to 2012, when “bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive”  became one of the Obama re-election campaign’s most resonant slogans. Its  message: Terrorism and al-Qaida are vanquished, so re-elect me. Had the  administration admitted that Ambassador Stevens and his three subordinates had  been killed by terrorists two months before the election, Obama’s most effective  campaign slogan would very publicly have been exposed for the farce it truly  was.

As everyone knows, for weeks the administration – including President Obama  himself at the U.N. – bizarrely blamed all the Benghazi mayhem, death and  destruction on a little-viewed Islam parody on YouTube.

After the Boston Marathon bombing – resulting in the four-day paralysis of a  major U.S. city, three murdered Americans and over 200 wounded, many grievously  – President Obama, under congressional pressure, addressed the danger of  terrorism in an hour-long speech on May 23. It was a good speech, as speeches  go, except that he didn’t even mention the real threat facing our  country today – the looming peril of nuclear terrorism – and instead it  vulgarized the future terrorist danger. “Homegrown extremists. This is the  future of terrorism,” the president proclaimed. All we need to really do is  close down Guantanamo and make a slight change in how we deploy drones.

With due respect, I must contradict President Obama. Today’s anti-American  terrorism was not born in the United States. It was conceived 48 years ago at  the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, and has been carried out by  Islamo-fascists armed with Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenades, Kalashnikovs  and Molotov <snip>tails – and that includes the terrorists who murdered Ambassador  Stevens.

Unfortunately, I witnessed the birth of anti-American terrorism. Years ago I  used to listen to Gen. Aleksandr Sakharovsky, when he was the Soviet Union’s  foreign espionage chief, pontificating that our chief weapon against our “main  enemy [the United States]” should now be terrorism, since nuclear arms had made  conventional military force obsolete.

I knew Sakharovsky well – he had been the Soviets’ chief intelligence adviser  to Romania for five years. He did not look like a brute, but terrorism was his  favorite solution to a political problem; during his years in Romania, he had  instigated the killing of some 50,000 anti-communists. Afterwards, Sakharovsky  served an unprecedented 16 years as head of the Soviet Union’s foreign  intelligence service (1956-1972), during which time he spread anti-American  terrorism around the world.

In 1969, Sakharovsky transformed airplane hijacking – the terrorists’ weapon  of choice on Sept. 11, 2001 – into international terrorism. In 1971, he launched  Operation Tayfun (Russian for “typhoon”), aimed at transforming the  world’s old hatred for the Nazis into a hatred for America, the new “occupation  power.” Sakharovsky even established a “socialist division of labor” aimed at  creating and arming anti-American terrorist organizations all over the world –  which he called “freedom fighters.”

I have explained all this expansively in a new book on “Disinformation” in its many guises, co-authored with professor Ronald Rychlak. Let me here just  briefly state that the success of Sakharovsky’s terrorist operations encouraged  his boss, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, to – as he used to put it – “turn the  whole Arab world into an explosive enemy of America” by resorting to  anti-Semitism, that weapon of the emotions successfully wielded by various  dictators over the years.

Andropov’s disinformation machinery, which at that time numbered over 1  million people (and is minutely described in our book), went to great lengths to  persuade the Islamic world that the U.S. was a war-mongering Zionist country  financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion”  – Andropov’s derisive epithet for the U.S. Congress.

The goal of that immense disinformation operation was to make the Islamic  world fear that the U.S. would transform the rest of the world into a Jewish  fiefdom. Andropov’s ploy worked. Consider the 1979 Islamic takeover of the U.S.  Embassy in Teheran, the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1985  Achille Lauro hijacking, the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center,  the 1998 destruction of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the  catastrophic 9/11 attacks.

Andropov’s success made him the first KGB officer to sit on the Kremlin  throne and to have his KGB office transformed into a shrine.

While Andropov and his Soviet Union are gone, a new generation of Russians is  struggling to give that feudal country a new identity. But the hatred for the  U.S. introduced into the Islamic world by Andropov’s KGB is still alive and  metastasizing.

In my other life, at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community, my  Romanian foreign intelligence service, the DIE, managed extensive intelligence  networks in the Islamic world, and I came to know that part of the world quite  well. Its people did not hate America. Millions of them are even today waiting  in line to be accepted in the U.S. because they admire America. There are only a  relative few fanatical Islamo-fascist leaders who so hate this great country of  freedom that they dream of seeing it destroyed.

Those fanatical Islamic leaders’ sustained hatred for the United States and  the specter that they will achieve nuclear power shows, in my view, that it is  high time for the leaders of our Congress and our Democratic and Republican  parties to forget President Obama’s pretty speeches and to start building a  united policy for winning the war against the plague of terrorism.

Along with unearthing the total truth about Benghazi, it is important that we  take steps to prevent new terrorist disasters. Competition may be the engine of  American progress, but unity in time of war is what made America the leader of  the world.

I do not know what the new U.S. anti-terrorist policy should be. No single  person in our country really knows. I do, however, know how anti-American  terrorism was generated, and I strongly suggest our current administration and  Congress take a serious look at President Truman’s National Security Council  Report 68 (NSC 68/1950), which set forth the strategy of containment and became  our main weapon in the Cold War.

That 58-page document did not blame the Cold War on YouTube videos. It  described the challenges facing the U.S. in cataclysmic terms.

“The issues that face us are momentous,” the document states, “involving the  fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization  itself.” Therefore, it prescribed a two-pronged political strategy: 1) superior  military power, and 2) a “Campaign of Truth,” defined as “a struggle, above all  else, for the minds of men.” Truman argued that the propaganda used by the  “forces of imperialistic communism” could be overcome only by the “plain,  simple, unvarnished truth.” The Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio  Liberation (soon to become Radio Liberty) became part of Truman’s “Campaign of  Truth.”

This same two-pronged strategy – total military superiority and a robust  campaign of utter truth – enabled America to prevail against communism, and is  equally essential if we are to get the upper hand in a world threatening the  unthinkable of nuclear terrorism.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/from-benghazi-to-nuclear-terrorism/#ArmUgTC1oEOQWycf.99