And on what evidence?
And why, as evidence mounts that U.S. officials on the ground in Libya knew from almost the very moments the attacks began, that this was a terrorist attack, that Democrats and their allies in the mainstream are strangely disinterested in this fabrication.
If you watched CNN tonight (at least from 5:40 PST until nearly 6:40), you’d be unaware of serious evidence brought to light today about the Administration’s duplicity on the Benghazi attacks. Seems some strange Arizona woman’s criminal actions have more bearing on the national interest than the Obama team’s misrepresenting a terrorist attack. Not to mention in its inept response to that attack.
RELATED: “Where Was the Commander-in-Chief For All of This?” (And why don’t our friends in the media care to ask?)
UPDATE: Over at Commentary, Jonathan Tobin does a great job of fleshing out a point related to the question addressed in the title to this post:
Just as problematic was [senior diplomat Gregory[ Hicks’s telling of his shock when he heard U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice tell the country that U.S. intelligence had decided the attack was the result of film criticism run amuck. Given that he had already communicated to Washington the fact that the film wasn’t a factor in Libya and that U.S. personnel in Libya knew the assault was the work of an Islamist group connected to al-Qaeda, this makes the growing controversy about the truth behind the official administration talking points that the White House altered to downplay any connection to terror even more worrisome. As Pete Wehner noted on Monday, the emails prove that the administration knowingly misled the country about the attack in a manner that makes it impossible to believe they weren’t motivated by their desire to help President Obama win re-election.
Read the whole thing.
Shouldn’t our media be investigating to see who fabricated the talking point — and why. And whether such senior officials as then-Secretary Clinton and even President Obama knew about — or even countenanced — the fabrication.
POSSIBLY RELATED: Hicks: Clinton Confidante Was ‘Very Upset’ Over My Cooperating in Investigation
UP-UPDATE: Writing this morning (05/09/13) in Powerline, Paul Mirengoff asks whether President Obama was “engaged at all during this crisis“:
Did he inquire about the options for responding? If so, what was he told and why did he concur in rejecting them? If not, why didn’t he inquire?
Read the whole thing. And don’t expect anyone in the legacy media to do the asking.
UP-UPDATE: Jennifer Rubin reminds us that
The “spontaneous demonstration” story line did not come from people on the ground or from the intelligence community (who knew from the get-go that al-Qaeda linked operatives were involved). It came from senior administration officials.
It sounds increasingly like someone in Hillary’s Office or at the White House was sitting around frantically searching Google for recent videos and things they could blame for the attacks.
Someone in the US Embassy in Cairo tweeted an apology for the video on 9/10/12. At that point, fewer than 7,000 people had viewed it on YouTube. It seems that the video was set up as an excuse for demonstrations and violence at any of our foreign installations expected to happen on the anniversary of the original 9/11 attack. The Administration wanted to continue the lie that Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009 had brought us goodwill in the Islamic world. When real shit went down in Benghazi, they ran with the video explanation to keep the fantasy alive that Libya was an Obama success story ruined by that “offensive” (but convenient) video.
watergate was a nothing story of republicans trying to spy on the democrats, something both parties do all the time. but the media told us the president lied and that was a big deal. we cannot have a president that lies to the american people. well now we are finding out that the media lied to us continuely about watergate, they have been lying to us for forty years. the media doesn’t give a good god damn about a president lying to the american. all the media really cares about is what party that president is in.
An inconvenient truth?
Who was saying it’s the hateful blasphemous video?
The Muslim mullahs. That’s who our administration believed. That’s who they listened to and responded to.
Think about it and it makes sense: the care they all took to call the video hateful, awful, terrible: Hillary repeatedly emphasizing that it did NOT come from the U.S. government and that we deplore denigrating other people’s religions; the swift and public arrest of Nakoula; sending out the U.N. REP to blame the video…that only makes sense if you are talking to the world.
They were talking to the Muslim world, not to us. They had to show the Muslim world that we were arresting the person who made the video. Then they explained over and over that such a video caused violent “demonstrations” . . .so don’t do that! (with a verbal nod to free speech). Hillary even explained that in front of coffins.
It seems like a shameful, fear-driven, immediate placating response to… who? what? Some threat, maybe against President Obama? That would explain why he disappeared and ended up in Vegas….
Elijah Cummings, “Death is part of life” sums up the completely dismissive attitude of the democrat charade they all participated in thus far. Add to that, the duplicitous media, the late night show ‘experts’ on terrorism, a bumbling WH press secretary (“It was a long time ago”) and the quote of all quotes from the former Sec. of State, “What difference does it make” and here we are. The dems have absolutely no interest in getting the facts. This country is truly going to Hell fast IMO under this administration’s inept leadership. How did we every stoop this low to cover up politicians and ignore the murder of 4 Americans left to fend for themselves?
I’ve felt for a while now that the real reason for this scandal now is that preacher a while back who threatened to burn a copy of the Koran but backed down. Imagine if he hadn’t: Instead of blaming the Benghazi attack on a meaningless amateur video, the White House wanted to say that this is all because that book was burned. Very likely, they would have gotten away with it too. The only problem with their premeditated plan was that the book wasn’t burned, and they had to scramble for a different scapegoat.
Even stranger was the speed of the professional production of that nauseating apology video by Hillary and Obama. Meanwhile the maker of the original video remains tucked away from any inquiries in a federal prison. Who financed his video in the first place?
What Difference Does It Make?
Thank God the woman who killed her fiancee in a brutal way was found guilty. Can we just get over that story? The media won’t cover the Gosnell story because it is a “local” crime story, but will not cover the Benghazi hearings The only network that covered the entire hearing with no interruptions was The Blaze. And their special on Benghazi and sex and human trafficking in the U.S. was great.
I want to know what happened to General Ham and the commander of the John Stennis both of whom were relieved of duty at almost the same time as they both were ready to disobey orders and go to the help of our people in Benghazi.
No doubt they were forced to retire and told they would loose their retirement if they spoke up. Just wish they would show the same courage they did that night today.
Roger Ebert is unavailable for comment.
On September 14, the bodies arrived at Andrews and Obama and Hillary put on a somber show or grief. Or something. In my many decades, I have never seen anything like it. The “staging” was unique and if I were there to watch my loved one’s body come home, I do not think I would have been at all touched by the political, photo op shenanigans that ensued.
Hillary made her YouTube video charge in her prepared remarks and Obama made the YouTube video charge in his remarks and they soulfully comforted one another at the conclusion of their politically staged remarks.
The video is fairly long, but I think it is worth watching. I viewed this event as it unfolded with wonder and sadness. I viewed it as a grieving American, not as a political operative. From the very outset, I wondered how in the world such a “ceremony” ever came to be staged as this one was. It reeked of using death as a prop for the spotlight on the politicians.
But, if you will listen, I am fairly certain you will be jarred by the tone and demeanor or the speakers when they get to the YouTube blame remarks. Hillary in particular changes her cadence and pounds the words in the charge with deliberate emphasis.
The deaths occurred on Sept. 11 and this was on Sept. 14. Susan Rice went on the five Sunday Morning talk shows on September 16.
From The Cable/Foreign Policy:
Here is Representative Gowdy introducing the email of Sept. 12 at the hearings yesterday.
It does not take a mind oriented toward a conspiracy theory answer to see the timeline problems with Obama and Hillary and their surrogate, Susan Rice, peddling the YouTube video malarky.
Also on September 12, 2012, Obama was interviewed by Steve Kroft for the CBS 60 Minutes program and he deflected any association with “terrorism” by saying the embassy was beset by people “looking to target American from the start.” That may seem to be a benign parsing of words in order to be cautious, but it certainly flies in the face of: “”The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.”
Obama bought room to lay the cause of the attacks elsewhere. He did so at the arrival of the bodies show on September 14, two days before Ambassador Rice was sent out to peddle the YouTube story.
Susan Rice did her duty as the designated javelin catcher and is now, for all intents and purposes, dead meat. As this thing goes on, you should expect to see bus sized tire tracks to appear running across her.
But “our fiends in the media” are not our friends—they are “their’s”. And you can fill-in any number of “their’s” in that category….
The Marxists considered “class traitors” the most contemptible.
We have the Liberal Media.
If you remember the 2008 Dhimmicrat primaries, Team Hillary aired a commercial with a phone ringing at 3 am, asking if you wanted someone with “experience” in foreign affairs and leadership to answer the phone.
Well, the actual phone rang at 3 am Benghazi time (9 pm Washington).
Nobody answered it.
Utterly shameful and pathetic. Whoever dropped the ball should burn in hell for all eternity.
Regards,
Peter H.
Equal protection no longer applies in any meaningful sense. Duh Won himself has said he can kill U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil, without any due process, and his own Justice Department has made it very clear that whites and Christians do not have any civil rights they are interested in protecting.
We conservatives are treated as second-class citizens and aren’t even allowed to ask meaningful questions of our government. This is actively enforced by the MSM libel machine. Our government now feels compelled to take our rights take from us for exercising them, and we are allowed very little protection under the law.
Meanwhile, when we do exercise our rights, we can be prosecuted for our motives (under the utterly stupid umbrella of “hate-crimes”). Furthermore, we can be deprived of due process by government bureaucrats who are held unaccountable when the victims of such abuse are Christian and/or non-minority or conservative (EPA, FBI, ATF et al).
I am not sure what moral obligation remains to an institution that no longer feels compelled to honor its legal obligations or even its founding heritage. I don’t know what the point is of trying to argue with those libtards who don’t see the problem with stuffed ballot boxes but do see problems with citizens exercising their Constitutional rights.
For what its worth – would it have been morally acceptable for the Jews to declare war on Germany in 1937?
Think about it.
Regards,
Peter H.
There is a great deal of “classified” stuff related to Benghazi. The backstory revolves around gun-running. We equipped anti-Qaddafi forces with sophisticated weapons in order to help them overthrow the dictator. That would mean the CIA, the DIA and State were all in the game.
Apparently, the Turkish government was involved, probably as the conduit. (I would like to stipulate that my use of “apparently” and “probably” is equivalent to using the word “alleged” for the Boston bombers.) We would find it necessary to keep such bilateral cooperation under wraps for the sake of diplomacy.
We are now propping up the Libyan government and apparently working to help them deal with the armed groups (Ansar al-Sharia, for instance) who would like to be in control. It involves trying to get the weapons we apparently helped to provide out of their hands.
It is further believed that we are interested in transferring the arms we have decided are no longer needed in Libya to Syria in order to bring down Assad. This may, in fact, have been a quid pro quo in getting assistance from Turkey in the Libyan affair.
I find it passing strange that we have gone back to the days of the CIA engaging in regime change. It started with Truman getting the Shah of Iran back in power. Eisenhower threw the Russian influence out of Guatemala. Kennedy botched the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. We wandered into Viet Nam to do regime change.
Past Presidents have issued Executive orders which severely limit the use of the military when dealing with potential threats against the United States of America; . . . these Executive orders limit the swift, sure, and precise action needed by the United States to protect our national security; present strategy allows the military to bomb large targets hoping to eliminate a terrorist leader, but prevents our country from designing a limited action which would specifically accomplish that purpose . .
So, instead of getting us into wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama Administration is back to toppling governments the old-fashioned “covert” way. A reasonable person might ask why Venezuela has been taken off the table in this game of covert “nation reorganization.”
Much of the “cover-up” characteristics of Benghazi is to keep our motives under wraps. The set of rules of operating in the clandestine world is that dead men tell no tales. The rules of operating in the muck of the crooked world is that you pay the crooks their fees. (Karzai, Kim Jong Un, Morsi, etc.)
There is a reason that Stevens was assassinated and the Benghazi installation was destroyed. The Obama administration does not want to discuss what caused it. They have a tangled web of deceit to protect in which the fingerprints lead everywhere.
There is a form of omerta at play. A “code of honor” exists in the culture of spy vs. spy and the machinations of Machiavellian underworld “diplomacy.” Crafty cunning and scheming and duplicity make for good action adventure reading and viewing, but it usually doesn’t work out so well when it is carried out by people like Obama or Hillary who have one foot in the world of public relations.
The disorder that Obama has brought to the Middle East will have lasting effects on whoever follows. Those folks nurse grudges that carry back for centuries. It will take enormous effort and skill to tamp down the reinvigorated energy and new-found power of the Muslim Brotherhood. If George W. Bush was wrong about democratic nation building, Obama and Clinton have been even more misguided in empowering the radical Muslims to drive Christians and Jews out of where ever they go as they put their own deadly intra-faith disagreements on hold.
Every dictator in the Middle East has shared one thing in common: Each one held religious radicals down with an iron fist. There is a common sense reason for that, even if you hated the particular dictator. Sometimes, reality is not pretty. Sometimes, utopian desires create an even worse reality. Thus, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” Normally, people don’t go on Amateur Hour with stirring up a hornet’s nest as their talent.
I am so glad Romney Lost
You guys are nuts.
If the Government was united with 3 out of the 4 brances in Republican harmoney, this country would be screwed.
Peter Hugues seems to be calling for war against America…just because he is in the minority….& helitrope says “The disorder that Obama has brought to the Middle East will have lasting effects on whoever follows”
I just can’t see how he could be living in such an isolated bubble and comment on a part of the world that he clearly knows nothing about! He would have us in Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, South America, Egypt, Libia and possibly Syria.
My god.
Actually, mike, it’s very simple.
You and your fellow Obama supporters have declared that you want Republicans and Christians murdered.
You and your fellow Obama supporters are insisting that gay people who don’t vote for Obama should be stripped of their right to vote and should kill themselves.
Both of the people I just listed are endorsed by Obama, supported by Obama, and have the full agreement of the Obama Party.
You and yours are ranting and screaming that we should be deprived of our rights and murdered because we don’t vote the way you want.
And your Barack Obama believes and supports this. Indeed, your Barack Obama’s rhetoric causes this behavior, just like your Barack Obama’s rhetoric caused the FRC shooter. You established the rule that hateful rhetoric causes these sort of violent statements and actions; now you will apply it in full force to yourself.
If you were a “moderate”, you would be appalled that Obama and his supporters are actually advocating stripping rights from and killing people for voting against him. Furthermore, given all your previous whining rhetoric about “civility”, and “hate speech”, you would be demanding that Obama repudiate these people and acknowledge their intolerance and bigotry. Indeed, you would hold Obama personally responsible for the FRC shooting and for the hate rants of those like Savage and Signorile who Obama directly endorses, inasmuch as you tried to hold Sarah Palin responsible for the Giffords shooting by a deranged Obama supporter.
But you are not, and you will prove that you are not by refusing to condemn Obama and his supporters for this behavior or apply your rules equally. Your failure to answer will demonstrate that you are a leftist radical and bigot who believes Republicans, and especially gay Republicans, should be murdered. You are a sick, deluded bigot and pervert, mike, who endorses hate rhetoric, violence, and discrimination against Republicans, conservatives, working people, those who save and accumulate wealth, and Christians.
You treat Republicans and conservatives in the same way that the Nazis treated Jews, mike. We recognize that, and we also know what happens next.
Oh, and before the sick pervert mike runs away, here’s the link to Obama’s call for gay conservatives and Republicans to be stripped of their voting rights and to kill themselves.
Run away now, sick pervert mike. Show us what a coward you are, what a deluded and pathetic little child you are, incapable of determining right and wrong, incapable of holding your Obama and his rhetoric responsible.
“You treat Republicans and conservatives in the same way that the Nazis treated Jews, mike. We recognize that, and we also know what happens next.”
And Goodwin’s law strikes again…
Democrats are claiming the Benghazi Investigation is a “witch hunt” out to get Hillary.
Is this tacit confirmation that Hillary is a witch?
Well, V, I can quote a reliable source that told me that when Shrillary was in the Senate and flew home on her private plane, the code name for her aircraft was “Broomstick One.”
You do the math. 😉
Regards,
Peter H.
You mean like Al Sharpton, David Corn, Louis Farrakhan, and other demi-luminaries on the left?
Try again.
Regards,
Peter H.
And Goodwin’s law strikes again…
Comment by mike — May 10, 2013 @ 4:09 am – May 10, 2013
That would be GODWIN’S Law, you ignorant fool.
And we don’t care, because your Barack Obama and your Barack Obama Party call Republicans and conservatives Nazis all the time without a peep of complaint from you.
Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to answer. Your failure to do so and your failure to condemn your Barack Obama and your Barack Obama Party for calling conservatives Nazis just proves what a lying and worthless hypocrite you are.
To quote Dan Aykroyd on “Point-Counterpoint” to Jane Curtin:
“mike, you ignorant slut!”
And yes, I went there. Deal with it.
Regards,
Peter H.