Boko Haram’s rein of terror could be brought to an end by a number of African nations declaring war on the violent Islamists, as reported by the London-based Sky News. To further exacerbate an already tense situation, the African leaders’ announcement comes on the heels of the revelation by The Daily Beast that the Obama administration has been in possession of solid evidence since 2011 that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network has been Boko Haram’s de facto godfather and benefactor since its inception in 2002.
With even more of the political spotlight being focused directly on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failure to classify the West African terrorists as such, the leaders of Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Benin have been meeting in the capital of their former colonial-era masters. The Equatorial African leaders have been conferring with French President Francois Hollande to formulate a joint strategy to battle the often especially vicious terrorists, who have recently kidnapped almost 300 Nigerian schoolgirls (overwhelmingly Christians), ostensibly to sell them into sexual slavery, specifically for Muslim men.
Chad President Idriss Deby stated that the group is in a state of “total war on Boko Haram.” Despite Barack Obama’s promise to the world prior to the 2012 presidential election that al Qaeda was both on its heels, Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan was quoted at the Paris meeting as sating that the Boko Haram jihadists have “become a regional al-Qaeda which threatened all of them.”
What difference does it make?
Hillary Clinton has more than a few allies in the Fourth Estate. The hard-left Daily Kos recently exemplified how many news organs sing her praises with lines such as the “exceptional qualities and morally outstanding character of Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
But now that bin Laden is dead, the usually Democratic-friendly Daily Beast hammered Clinton in a separate article for her failing to heed the 2011 call by the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, and well over a dozen U.S. Senators and Congressmen to brand Boko Haram a foreign terrorist organization.
As reporter Josh Rogin of The Daily Beast notes, Clinton not only ignored these calls but went as far as to militate against passage of the Republican-sponsored Boko Haram Terrorist Designation Act of 2013 (Senate Bill 198). If it had passed, the State Department would have been forced to declare Boko Haram terrorists. If then-Secretary Clinton continued to insist that Boko Haram should not be officially named a terrorist organization, she would been bound by law to explain to the U.S. Congress and people why there was no sufficient reason to do so.
