While American forces were overrunning Iraq in 2003, there was one man Saddam Hussein repeatedly counted on to beclown himself with false and public proclamations of Iraqi military superiority and victory over the United States. That man was Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraq information minister more commonly known as “Baghdad Bob.”
Americans haven’t heard from Baghdad Bob in nearly two decades, but we have been treated to a similarly consistent liar in former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and National Security Adviser Susan Rice.
Rice’s official role as America’s Baghdad Bob began in 2012, when she went on multiple national television programs and lied to the American people about the Benghazi attacks, claiming that they were the result of a protest against an American-made video and not a premeditated act of terror. Her comments have since been completely debunked as lies.
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Rice followed up her Benghazi disgrace in 2014 when she justified trading Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban prisoners by claiming that Bergdahl had served “with honor and distinction” and was “captured on the battlefield.” This, of course, turned out to be yet another Rice falsehood; Bergdahl was later court-martialed and convicted of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.
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Now, three years after leaving government, we are still learning of a new Susan Rice lie. In March 2017, Rice told Judy Woodruff of PBS that she “knew nothing” about the allegation by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., that members of the Trump transition team had been “swept up in the surveillance of foreigners at the end of the Obama administration.”
We now know from Rice’s Jan. 20, 2017, CYA email to herself that she was not only aware of the investigation and surveillance of retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, her successor as national security adviser, but that she was actively involved.
Despite Rice’s pattern of lying on major national security incidents, she does not deserve all the blame. Ironically, I take her at her word that she was directed to write the CYA email by Obama’s White House counsel. Ultimately, Rice was one of many Baghdad Bobs for Big Brother Barack Obama’s Orwellian Autocracy.
In reality, it was the Obama administration that was chipping away at our republic and the rule of law.
Too harsh? Well, for the past three years we have been listening to brutal takes from Democrats and their media surrogates such as: “Trump is failing at governing but winning at authoritarianism,” “Trump, Barr are turning U.S. into a banana republic,” “An unchained Donald Trump poses a threat to the US republic,” and “Like a dictator, Trump keeps chopping away at democracy.”
But, in reality, it was the Obama administration that was chipping away at our republic and the rule of law.
It was Obama that expanded the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program in the United States and it was his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who lied about it before Congress.
It was also Obama’s CIA led by John Brennan that spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee as it was preparing its report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Like Rice and Clapper, Brennan lied about it.
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Not satisfied just spying on Americans and the Senate Intelligence Committee, Obama’s Orwellian Autocracy “spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.”
And finally, it was the Obama administration that colluded with the Clinton campaign to open the baseless Russia investigation into Donald Trump and his campaign.
Therefore, it is not surprising that on the last day of the Obama administration, just two days before the Wall Street Journal published the bombshell “U.S. eyes Michael Flynn’s links to Russia” based on “people familiar with the matter,” that Rice would send a CYA email to herself in order to create a record for posterity that the Flynn investigation was done “by the book.” (As many know, the term “by the book” was a trigger to speak in code to fool the antagonist in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”).
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It is also not surprising that when her involvement was suspected, Rice resorted to the Obama national security team’s favorite tactic – lying to the American people.
No matter how hard Democrats and many in the mainstream media try to portray the Durham investigation, the Flynn revelations or other criticisms of the Russia investigation as “conspiracy theories,” the fact is that it was the Obama administration that frayed the edges of our Republic and the Trump administration is bringing that to light.
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