Obama Administration’s Benghazi Lies Exposed as State Department Cover-Up

Posted on | May 4, 2013 | 20 Comments

Flaming skull alert at Ace of Spades for the release of e-mails confirming that (a) officials knew from the outset that the attack on the consulate in Libya was the work of terrorists, but (b) this information was suppressed for political purposes:

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, worried that members of Congress would use the talking points to criticize the State Department for “not paying attention to [CIA] warnings.”

So, it was CIA vs. C.Y.A. at the State Department which, quite frankly, has been infiltrated by Edward Said-influenced Arab specialists to such an extent that it was practically a Muslim Brotherhood outpost even before the Obama administration took over.

Seriously, you can ask Bush administration people about this: Middle Eastern scholarship within academia is so dominated by anti-Western views that, insofar as anyone has the credentials to qualify as a specialist in the field — i.e., to get hired into and promoted within the bureaucracy — they’re certain to have been saturated in ideas about “Western imperialism” and the legitimacy of Arab/Islamic grievances. And while this has also been a problem at the CIA and the Pentagon, the State Department is absolutely chock-full of such people in staff positions, so that even with hawkish neocons in the political appointee roles during the Bush years, the pro-Arab/pro-Muslim culture at Foggy Bottom never really changed.

I feel the need to point this out now because some of my well-meaning conservative friends, who (quite correctly) complain about the dubious influences within the Obama administration, often neglect to discuss the larger problem, which pre-dates Obama. However, there is good reason to think it is more of a problem now:

In 1998 Obama attended a speech by [Edward] Said, in which the scholar called for a nonviolent campaign “against settlements, against Israeli apartheid.” In a well-publicized photo, Obama and Said can be seen talking over dinner at this pro-Arab event.
According to the Los Angeles Times, in the early 1980s Obama had been one of Said’s students in an undergraduate English class at Columbia University.

None of this is necessarily related to the Benghazi cover-up — I don’t mean to feed anyone’s conspiratorial paranoia — but it does highlight the nature of the larger problem, what Jeanne Kirkpatrick rightly called the “Blame America First” mentality.

There is a sort of perverse narcissism involved in this worldview: Encountering people who hate us, liberals think, “It’s about us.”

This error was what crippled liberalism during the Cold War. If the Soviet Union wanted to destroy America, liberals imagined, this must be because of something wrong with America, rather than something wrong with the Soviet Union. So liberals wanted to change American foreign policy — détente! — in a more pro-Soviet direction, accepting the Leninist critique of “Western imperialism” as essentially accurate, so that you had Jimmy Carter claiming (and evidently believing) that a U.S. commitment to “human rights” would somehow repair the damage to American international prestige.

Except it wasn’t about us. It was about them.

Ronald Reagan understood instinctively that the Cold War wasn’t America’s fault, and that it couldn’t be ended by making American policy less “imperialist” (mainly because imperialism was a propaganda accusation conjured up in Vladimir Lenin’s imagination). The Cold War could only end with the destruction of the Soviet Union, and so Reagan made that the object of his foreign policy.

Liberals have repeated in the post-Soviet era the same narcissistic error that made them so wrong during the Cold War: “It’s about us.”

After 9/11, liberals wrung their hands and asked, “Why do they hate us?” The most eloquent answer was provided by the Lebanese-American author Brigitte Gabriel: Because They Hate.

Some foreign policy scholar at Heritage or AEI really should write a monograph tracing the problem of Islamic terrorism back to its Cold War origins as a variant of the Soviet policy of fomenting “brush-fire wars” — crypto-nationalist uprisings in the Third World which were always (and not coincidentally) anti-Western and anti-American in their orientation. Yassir Arafat was to Palestinians what Ho Chi Minh was to the Vietnamese, and was likewise a Soviet client.

The Soviet Strategy of Terror has enjoyed a zombie-like existence for the past 20 years, outliving its original Marxist sponsors, because (a) liberals never came to grips with their Cold War errors, and (b) most conservatives have been afraid to be thought “McCarthyites” for calling attention to this neglected chapter of history. (It hasn’t helped, of course, that the author of the 1981 Heritage monograph subsequently fell into disfavor as a critic of neoconservatism, so that even while his analysis continues to be cited as authoritative, the Heritage Foundation itself has let Sam Francis’s seminal work lapse into obscurity.)

Ask yourself this: Why should Muslims from Pakistan and other places far away from the Middle East espouse the same anti-American and anti-Israel grievances as Palestinian radicals in Gaza and the West Bank? Why was the Soviet Union — fanatically devoted to an atheistic and internationalist ideology — nevertheless favorable to Arafat’s nationalist cause and to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran? These questions are inextricably related, because the anti-American policies of the Soviets (which answer the second question) have endured as anti-American propaganda that answers the second question.

The fact that Islamic terrorists in Pakistan and Algeria and Somalia don’t acknowledge that their hatred of America has a Cold War origin does not change the fact that this is where it originated. If colonialism or imperialism actually explained the radical ideology of these terrorists, their wrath would be directed at France or Britain or other European powers that once colonized those places. Yet we not only find that radicals in these far-flung outposts of Islam make anti-Americanism a central part of their rhetoric, we are also startled (or, at least, we should be startled) to discover Muslims ranting against Israel and the Jews in places thousands of miles from Israel where there aren’t any Jews.

Our leaders cannot talk sense about this problem, mainly because they don’t understand the problem, in large part because the disciples of Edward Said have monopolized the subject in academia. So we have an updated version of Cold War liberalism — Blame America First 2.0 — that leads to the idiocy of the “Arab Spring,” and a State Department that doesn’t want to confront the reality of an al-Qaeda terrorist threat in post-Gaddhafi Libya. Bad ideas yield bad policy, so that the deaths of a U.S. Ambassador and three other Americans are viewed primarily as a public-relations problem for Hillary Clinton and he Democrat Party!

God help us.

Ann Coulter was right: Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. The problem with the Bush policy was the political correctness of compassionate conservatism. We never got around to Phase Three because we were afraid to “impose our religion” on them. So now we have crazy Chechen jihadis blowing people up in Boston, and liberals telling us it’s America’s fault.

Category: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Intellectuals, Islam, Libya, Terrorism

Comments

20 Responses to “Obama Administration’s Benghazi Lies Exposed as State Department Cover-Up”

inheritthewind1
May 4th, 2013 @ 11:47 am

@smitty_one_each http://t.co/kR37kLDotS http://t.co/4kb3G8gb9m http://t.co/eCY9L6D1bp http://t.co/hlqcO4tjbA http://t.co/WZZCq151EN
Dianna Deeley
May 4th, 2013 @ 12:43 pm

Furious and outraged. From Riga Latvia.
jakee308
May 4th, 2013 @ 1:32 pm

Well, DUH.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
May 4th, 2013 @ 1:52 pm

If this were a Republican, the media would be all over this. But from Obama and Clinton…just crickets.
Shawny Lee
May 4th, 2013 @ 1:55 pm

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/04/benghazi-names-whistleblower-witnesses-revealed/
Oh Baby! These whistleblowers aren’t just anybody. They sure are my heroes though. Eternal gratitude gentlemen. The truth is always the right decision. Thank you for having the courage to make that decision.
richard mcenroe
May 4th, 2013 @ 2:13 pm

I’m sure Jake Tapper and all the other “honest journalists” will be all over this.
Adjoran
May 4th, 2013 @ 2:44 pm

Is that the same dinner – honoring some other Palestinian hero – that the LAT has a video of, keeping it under wraps through two election campaigns to avoid letting the public see something Obama said or did? Maybe if the Kochs buy the rag, they will force it to be released and we can see what he REALLY thinks of Israel, eh?

~~~~~

It’s clear this was a cover-up from the start. Hillary had turned down the security requests, perhaps at the behest of Obama, perhaps on her own, and did not wish to be held accountable. It seems, though, that Susan Rice added in the nonsense about the video, which wasn’t mentioned even in the third version of the talking points from State and CIA. Perhaps she got it from the White House, but it any case she lied about it.

The fact of a cover-up is proven by the refusal by the Administration to even set up a clearance process for the lawyer representing the whistleblowers. There is no real question about her security clearance, Victoria Toensing headed up the Terrorist division in Justice herself. But refusing to grant her clearance, or even a process to get it, means her clients can’t tell her everything because Obama classified all those details to keep them from prying eyes.

Hang every freakin’ traitor and leave them twisting in the wind as a warning to others.
DaveO
May 4th, 2013 @ 3:37 pm

During Bush-43, we saw the CIA leak anything and everything that wasn’t nailed down in order to deflect attention away from the CIA’s reliance on a single, French-bought source of WMD in Iraq (that we found WMD shocked the CIA).

During Bush-43, we saw the SecDef, Rummy, try to transform the DoD Civil Service in order to make them effecient, effective, and even understand they work for America. We saw DoD GSers undermine that effort, slow-rolling reforms while fast-tracking acquisitions that were so redundant even the Defense Contractors felt ashamed.

The State Department held special meetings to get volunteers for Iraq and Afghanistan. A number of the Old Guard retired rather than serve America. Fortunately, enough came forward, even those that personally disliked Bush.

The larger picture is that the Civil Service is a modern spoils system, a jobs program that sends money to the Dems through the unions, guarantees employment without accountability, and never fails to fail. Every POTUS, regardless of party, is saddled with an ineffective management system.
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May 4th, 2013 @ 3:53 pm

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bittman
May 4th, 2013 @ 4:15 pm

Everyone should have had flags go up that something was very wrong when Obama, Hillary, and Rice lied about the video for 2-3 weeks.
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May 4th, 2013 @ 6:29 pm

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David R. Graham
May 4th, 2013 @ 7:06 pm

This post contains vital analysis that the comments, so far, do not address. The link to Sam Francis is much appreciated, in addition to the original The Other McCain correlations between Soviet and Mohammedan operations. I had not heard of Francis, despite being a near (slightly earlier) contemporary of his. But my empathy for him and his analysis, even as given by a fair but opprobrious essayist, was immediate and grateful. There is gold in this The Other McCain post and the linked post about Sam Francis.
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May 4th, 2013 @ 8:27 pm

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David R. Graham
May 4th, 2013 @ 11:34 pm

“The State Department held special meetings to get volunteers for Iraq and Afghanistan.”

They had to. State dregs went to OIF and OEF. Tops go to Columbia, etc., where the “amenities” are compelling.
Sonny Rudd
May 5th, 2013 @ 4:27 am

United States Government Corruption, Inc.at its best. Why do we allow this to continue? Are we affraid of these people who failing at their Oath of Office. Remeber they work for us. If we fail on our jobs like these cronies have we would have been fired buy now If you don’t believe me ask Donald Trump.
IngeC
May 5th, 2013 @ 10:03 am

During the Cold War or rather before, we had communists infiltrating our government; now we have additionally jihadists/muslim brotherhood members and, they are there shaping everything all the way to the top.
Has anybody heard from Hillary’s Huma Abedin – the muslim brotherhood family member – lately?
IngeC
May 5th, 2013 @ 10:09 am

Hillary, Obama, Holder and Brennan et all hired, recruited and armed ‘jihadists’ or AQ fanatics since 2008; the same cretins who have murdered thousands of our men and women in uniform, which in turn were set loose to overthrow various governments throughout the middle east.
K-Bob
May 5th, 2013 @ 11:38 pm

Doug Ross has a timeline of the Benghazi attack in spreadsheet form over at his site. Start here, and follow the link to the more complete version.

The internet is good.
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