Revealed: Hillary Clinton's State Department refused to class Boko Haram as a 'terror group' even after it threatened to 'murder the U.S. ambassador' to Nigeria
- Boko Haram vowed in February 2012 to assassinate Ambassador Terence McCulley if the U.S. helped Nigeria with terror-fighting efforts
- 'We know his house ... We know his vehicle and the time he leaves his house and the time he returns,' the group said in a communique to media
- The warning was similar to Ansar al-Shariah's pledge to kill U.S. officials in Benghazi, Libya, three months before the deadly 2012 terror attack there
- Despite clear threats, Hillary Clinton's State Department fought efforts to officially designate the mass-murdering Nigerians as a terrorist group
- A former State Dept. official said naming new terror groups 'sent the wrong message' about al-Qaeda and its allies as Barack Obama ran for re-election
Boko Haram, the African Islamist terror group whose April kidnapping of nearly 300 young girls has united the civilized world in anger, promised to assassinate U.S. ambassador to Nigeria Terence McCulley in February 2012, vowing to murder him if America signed a terrorism-fighting Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) with the government in Abuja.
McCulley, now the U.S. ambassador to Ivory Coast, was not harmed. But the threat, coming amid a years-long bombing campaign that killed more than 1,400 Nigerian civilians, didn't move then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to fast-track the addition of Boko Haram to the U.S. government's official list of international terrorist groups.
Independent media outlets inside Nigeria first reported on February 9, 2012 that an unnamed Boko Haram leader issued a statement promising that 'we will murder the U.S. Ambassador if the MOU is signed.'
The revelation provides a stark parallel with assassination warnings issued by Islamist groups in Benghazi, Libya in the months before the September 11, 2012 attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American personnel.
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In 2011 and 2012 the Islamist terror group Boko Haram detonated a bomb nearly every day for 15 months, including this December 2011 blast at St. Theresa Catholic Church outside the Nigerian capital Abuja
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (L) met with Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan (R), Nigerian ambassador to the U.S. Ade Adefuye (2nd L) and Nigerian Foreign Minister Olugbenga Ashiru (2nd R) in Abuja on August 9, 2012, but despite threats to U.S. interests she refused to declare Boko Haram a terrorist group
In June of that year, Ansar al-Shariah – the al-Qaeda-linked group that carried out the Benghazi attack – held a parade, two days of rallies and a press conference in central Benghazi. With dozens of military vehicles and heavy arms on display, the terrorists held what an intelligence analyst later said was 'a team pep rally before the game, only for jihad.'
The Clinton State Department infamously ignored that event, even though the first attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi followed two days later – a bombing at the compound's gate that left a hole big enough for 40 men to walk through.
Later requests for additional armed guards at the Benghazi station also fell on deaf ears. Ansar al-Shariah ultimately returned to finish the job.
A September 2013 report from the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee ominously speculated that McCulley's fate in Nigeria could be the same as Stevens' in Libya.
'The danger that Boko Haram may try a similar assault on diplomatic personnel there, as they [Ansar al-Shariah] did in Libya, is a terrifying possibility.'
Then-U.S. Ambassador Terence McCulley, spoke at a mining and oil-production conference on Feb. 8, 2012, the day before Boko Haram threatened to assassinate him in retaliation for U.S. cooperation with efforts to fight terror in Nigeria
The threat against Ambassador McCulley's life in Nigeria had come three months before the Benghazi parades.
'We have had him under surveillance for a while and if the MOU is signed, we will carry out a premeditated attack on him,' Boko Haram had said in a separate statement, according to Nigerian media.
'We know his house in Maitaima [a northern district of Abuja], We know his vehicle and the time he leaves his house and the time he returns.'
Nigeria's civilian government, the group added at the time, would be making a grave mistake if it joined America in an 'unholy marriage' to fight 'our men.'
The Daily Post Nigeria in Lagos confirmed the report on February 10, 2012, adding that Boko Haram had also threatened 'several suicide attacks on American targets' as part of an 'international jihad.'
It's not clear why the State Department resisted adding Boko Haram to its Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list for so long.
A former State Department official who served in a legal capacity under Secretary Clinton told MailOnline on Wednesday that one component of the decision was undeniably political.
'Bulking up the FTO list was not what anyone in leadership wanted,' the former official said. 'At some point it became as much about how things looked as what needed to happen.'
The George W. Bush administration added 17 such groups to the FTO list in eight years. Obama's State Department had added 11 by the time he stood for re-election in 2012.
During the election season, the Benghazi attack threatened to simultaneously unravel both of Obama's foreign policy victories: the undoing of al-Qaeda through the death of Osama bin Laden, and the promised stabilization of Libya following the overthrow of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, both in 2011.
Bringing attention to the expansion of Islamist terror in Nigeria, an important U.S. trading partner, would have counted against Obama as he campaigned to keep his job, according to the former State Department official.
'We all understood, as the State Department does today, that al-Qaeda is far from being defeated,' he said. 'But no one wants to say that in a swing state, right?'
The Memorandum Of Understanding between the U.S. and Nigeria was inked six months later, after Clinton visited Abuja personally on August 9, 2012.
In it the U.S. offered Nigeria's government assistance 'in forensics and post-attack inspections,' according to a Voice of America report, as well as help improving their methods of tracking and arresting militants – but no direct special-forces or other military assistance.
Clinton also proposed to help Nigerian security forces set up an 'intelligence fusion cell' to professionalize the way they shared information, similar to how U.S. military and law enforcement agencies routinely cooperate.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan thanked Clinton in 2012 for America's 'moral support' and 'technical support' during the 2010 elections that brought him to power, but didn’t address any American cooperation with his attempt to crack down on Boko Haram.
When Clinton arrived, the group was detonating a bomb nearly every day, racking up a death toll that approached 1,400 – mostly Christians.
But the State Department resisted adding Boko Haram to its list of designated terror groups until John Kerry, Clinton's successor, pulled the trigger in November 2013
That same month, McCulley left his post in Nigeria for Ivory Coast.
Just another day in Nigeria: Boko Haram destroyed the Gamboru central market on May 5, 2014 in the Ngala district of Borno State in the northeastern region of the country
First lady Michelle Obama launched her bid at 'hashtag diplomacy' after Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped nearly 300 Nigerian girls in April
Clinton fought pressure to regard Boko Haram as a threat to U.S. interests throughout President Barack Obama's first term, as it morphed from a Muslim religious study group in 2002 into a hard-line regional Islamist terror organization by mid-2009.
Its militants bombed the United Nations building in Abuja in 2011, bringing new terror-designation pleas from the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department and more than a dozen members of Congress.
The Clinton State Department did add three Boko Haram leaders – as individuals – to its list of terrorists on June 21, 2012.
In a press briefing that day, then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters that 'there is always this question of whether designating individuals within an organization is the most effective strategy or whether the designating the whole organization is the most effective strategy. So we’re continuing to look at the question of a broader designation.'
'More broadly,' she added, 'we are working with the government of Nigeria and encouraging it in its dialogue with forces in the north, to promote a unified, multi – pluralistic Nigeria where the rights of all people, no matter their religion, no matter where they live, are protected in its own security efforts, that it examine its tactics, it look more at policing, and that it begin a real dialogue about some of the roots of the dissatisfaction in the north, which are primarily economic.'
More than a year later, on July 31, 2013, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf was asked for an update after Boko Haram killed 45 people in a series of coordinated attacks.
In a May 12, 2014 video released by Boko Haram, a man claiming to be its leader Abubakar Shekau said hundreds of missing Nigerian schoolgirls had converted to Islam and would not be released until the terror group's militants were freed from Nigerian prisons
'Can you comment on why Boko Haram hasn’t been designated as a foreign terrorist organization?' a reported asked, according to the briefing transcript.
'I don’t have anything for you on that,' Harf replied.
Officially designating a foreign organization as a terror group allows the U.S. to freeze bank assets belonging to the group and its members and add them to no-fly lists. It also permits American law-enforcement agencies to prioritize their resources toward fighting the organizations.
'Boko Haram' is a loose translation of the Hausa-language phrase 'Western education is sinful.'
But that phrase is more of a nickname for the organization whose official moniker is 'Jama'atul Alhul Sunnah Lidda'wati wal Jihad,' or 'people committed to the propagation of the Prophet's teachings and jihad.'
The Obama administration has responded to the group's April kidnappings, and to its threat to sell the captured girls into slavery if a prisoner swap isn't agreed to, with what detractors call 'hashtag diplomacy.'
First lady Michele Obama appeared in a photograph that quickly circled the globe, holding a placard reading '#BringBackOurGirls.'
She followed with a Saturday radio address expressing her outrage over Boko Haram's kidnap spree, but never mentioning its status as a radical Muslim sect, or the Nigeria-wide conflict between northern Muslims and southern Christians that has fed its rise to power.
The U.S. Embassy in Abuja has issued repeated warnings about threats to American citizens in Nigeria, including some after the September 2012 Benghazi attack.
Intelligence analysts told MailOnline that Boko Haram has been behind a long string of kidnappings since 2010, mostly of Westerners, and largely at the direction of al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
In January 2012 the United Nations Security Council reported that Boko Haram had sent militants to train in AQIM camps in Mali, and Niger's foreign minister said days later that there was credible intelligence the group had trained at AQIM camps across central Africa.
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