By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — After denouncing denial of medical care to abortion-surviving babies — a currently pressing issue that the press prefers to avoid — a Phoenix Tea Party leader turned to a different life-and-death matter.
Arizona Project chairman Ron Ludders noted that it was almost seven full years since the still-mystifying deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and his security personnel at the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012, shortly before that year’s U.S. presidential election.
Ludders had invited Michael Morrison, an expert in U.S. embassy security, to speak to his Tea Party’s regular Monday evening meeting on February 25. “People lost their lives, needlessly,” in the Libya attack, Ludders said — back when Democrat President Barack Obama was running for his second term and his secretary of state was Hillary Clinton.
First, though, Ludders attacked Arizona Democrat legislators who had introduced a bill to repeal the Grand Canyon State’s requirement that abortion-surviving babies receive care. (See the hardcopy Wanderer dated for February 28, page 1, “Fearing Public Reaction, Arizona Democrat Legislators Abandon Their Radical Abortion Bill.”)
“If any of you ever vote for one of these people, I will be ashamed of you,” Ludders told his audience, adding that he’d written to the Democrats to say, “Abortion is not a form of birth control. It is a form of murder.”
He also recalled that an Arizona GOP state representative, Walter Blackman, told a state capitol hearing of his pain at knowing the numbers of millions of black babies from his own community being aborted.
Blackman told a February 20 Judiciary Committee hearing it’s ironic that those who want to protect his civil rights also want to kill him before birth.
When Ludders mentioned the Trump administration’s new rule to cut off $60 million in tax funding from Planned Parenthood, his Tea Party audience applauded.
If Democrats can kill a newborn, “What’s next?…Us,” Ludders said, meaning older people once they’re considered to have lived beyond their useful years.
As Donald Trump flew to Hanoi, Vietnam, on February 25 to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, the president tweeted about Democrats’ scandal that evening in the U.S. Senate as they blocked consideration of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, sponsored by Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.).
Trump tweeted: “Senate Democrats just voted against legislation to prevent the killing of newborn infant children. The Democrat position on abortion is now so extreme that they don’t mind executing babies AFTER birth. This will be remembered as one of the most shocking votes in the history of Congress. If there is one thing we should all agree on, it’s protecting the lives of innocent babies.”
Morrison, the embassy security expert, told the Phoenix audience that he was born Scottish in Singapore while his father served in the British military, then was taken to Scotland when he was about one year old. Morrison, 58, said he became a proud U.S. citizen in 1991 after following proper legal requirements.
He never dreamed of growing up to be a doctor or lawyer, but always wanted to be a soldier, and served as a military medic, Morrison said.
American embassies need to be protected by Americans, Morrison said, but in some Third World countries, uniforms and security credentials may be provided to untrustworthy non-Americans.
Morrison said later that he hopes the State Department can be persuaded to stop using foreign nationals as U.S. security. “Why do we do things the way we do? Why is the State Department run the way it is?” he asked.
“Ambassador Stevens was a good man” whose murder shouldn’t have happened, Morrison said earlier in his talk. “I believe he was allowed to die, to shut him up,” because Stevens had knowledge of arms deals going on.
Someone used a crisis situation to have Stevens killed, Morrison said.
In bazaars in Cairo, Egypt, a person can buy anything, including weapons, he said.
“I wish I could tell you exactly what happened to Ambassador Stevens. . . . He was murdered violently, it wasn’t quick,” Morrison said, adding, “Nobody knows for sure” who wanted him killed.
Morrison added that Hillary Clinton had tried to blame motivation for the attack on a video.
In September 2016, recently retired State Department whistleblower Greg Hicks told Fox News of the secretary of state’s seriously deficient performance before Stevens and his guards were murdered.
Hicks said that Clinton “abandoned her diplomats by ignoring her security obligations. She sent Ambassador Stevens to Benghazi during the 2011 revolution and then induced him to return in the first few months of his tenure, which accounted for his September visit there.
“Despite the fact that (her adviser) Sidney Blumenthal had alerted her to the increasing danger for Americans in Benghazi and Libya, Mrs. Clinton apparently never asked security professionals for an updated briefing on the situation in Libya,” Hicks said.
“Either she could not correlate the increased tempo of attacks in Libya with the safety of our diplomats, demonstrating fatal incompetence, or she was grossly negligent,” he said.
Morrison told the Phoenix audience that he had a team ready to go in, but an order came to “Stand down” 11 days before the deaths. “My belief is we were going to go in to relieve the current security team,” he added later.
If a member of an operation doesn’t need to know where he’ll be the next day, he won’t know, although his team leader may know, Morrison said. “There’s a lot of people who were over there don’t know, either. . . .
“That’s a problem with diplomacy. Diplomacy is never clean,” he said, asking how did the attackers know where Stevens was.
“Everybody was told to stand down,” he said, adding that a helicopter ready to lift off was given the order, too.
“There’s only one person who can stand down a military operation, that’s the president,” unless someone acts in his name, Morrison said.
There For A Reason
When The Wanderer asked Morrison after his talk to elaborate on someone else acting in the president’s name, Morrison said it could be an official that the president didn’t want to get into a public dispute with.
“We’re never going to know the truth. We never will,” Morrison told the audience about the attack and deaths at the embassy.
Turning to other topics, Morrison expressed his approval of Trump as the leader the U.S. needs, just as President Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been the right answer for their countries in the 1980s.
“I thank God every day for Maggie and for Ronnie. . . . She was ahead of her time, just like Ronald Reagan was. Just like Trump is now. . . . He’s there for a reason, and I’ll be damned” if Trump is allowed to be taken down, Morrison said.
The government plans ahead for possibilities that people don’t ordinarily think of, he said, even in these days of terrorism. The FBI thinks that if some extreme event were to occur in Phoenix, within 60 days 90 percent of the population would be dead, Morrison said.
“You think our government hasn’t thought about this?. . . . This isn’t some kind of made-up story. This is what our government is spending money on,” he said, anticipating how to deal with crises.
On another topic, Morrison said the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia should have been protected by the federal Marshals Service. Scalia was found dead at a remote Texas resort in February 2016 in what seemed unusual circumstances.
Regarding illegal immigration, he said that walking from Honduras to the U.S. border is like walking from Phoenix to Chicago. How do caravans arrive here looking so well-off after covering such a distance, he asked.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress