Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s embassy in Tripoli, Libya, warned State Department officials in Washington, D.C., not to blame the Youtube video, Innocence of Muslims, for the Benghazi terrorist attack.
The House Benghazi Committee released a new email Saturday that a Tripoli embassy official sent to Clinton’s underlings in Washington, D.C., on September 14, 2012, two days before Susan Rice appeared on Sunday talk shows to use the administration’s “video” talking point.
“Colleagues, I mentioned to [redacted] this morning, and want to share with all of you, our view at Embassy Tripoli that we must be cautious in our local messaging with regard to the inflammatory film trailer, adapting it to Libyan conditions,” the official wrote.
You can read the whole thing. The official in Tripoli told the State Department that it was “increasingly clear that the series of events in Benghazi was much more terrorist attack than a protest which escalated into violence,” and warned against conflating the simultaneous protests in Egypt with “this well-planned attack by militant extremists” in Libya. What this email shows is that Clinton cannot plausibly claim she believed the lies about the Benghazi attack that she and others (including Susan Rice) promoted in the days after Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed on Sept. 11, 2012.
The Benghazi cover-up was necessary, first of all, to protect Obama’s re-election campaign message that, with the death of Osama bin Laden, the threat of Islamic terrorism had been defeated. By deliberately lying — portraying the Benghazi attack as a protest against a YouTube video — Clinton sought to reverse the meaning of this event, creating the false impression that right-wing “Islamophobia” was a greater threat than radical Islam itself. Furthermore, there is clear evidence that what happened at Benghazi was a consequence of U.S. covert operations to influence the so-called “Arab Spring” uprisings that had begun in 2011. Questions about what Ambassador Stevens was doing in Benghazi, and the nature of the CIA operations in Libya he was apparently overseeing, are at the heart of what this scandal is really about.
“What difference, at this point, does it make?”
The answer to Hillary Clinton’s now-infamous question is that the death of four Americans in Benghazi brought to light an aspect of Obama administration policy that continues to have consequences for U.S. national security. Was the “Arab Spring” a spontaneous occurrence or was it a result of a U.S. covert policy intended to overthrow the governments of Libya, Egypt and Syria? There have been reports that the United States supplied weapons to the rebels who toppled Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi and then sought to recover those weapons, shipping them to opponents of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. It is believed that Ambassador Stevens went to Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, as part of that operation, to conduct negotiations with Libyan rebels who were refusing to give up their U.S.-supplied weapons. This backstory of the Benghazi attack, as part of a much larger U.S. policy in the North Africa/Middle East region, is why this ongoing investigation cannot be dismissed as mere partisan politics or a trivial concern with Hillary Clinton’s personal emails. The current crisis surrounding ISIS militants in Syria and Iraq, which has caused the deployment of U.S. Special Forces to Syria, is directly connected to the policies that Hillary Clinton implemented and supervised during her tenure as Secretary of State.
Meanwhile, Islamic extremists are exploiting the instability that the Obama administration’s policies have created. Egypt:
ISIS has released a video purporting to show the final moments of the Russian jet that crashed in Egypt, killing all 224 people on board.
The terror group has claimed it downed the aircraft, but has not said how it might have done so. The horrific footage . . . shows a large structure resembling a plane falling through the air, before being consumed by a mass of smoke.
Cairo and Moscow have denied any possible terrorism link in the incident, which was one of the deadliest Airbus crashes in the past decade.
However, it has emerged that the aircraft broke up mid-air scattering debris and bodies over a wide area. . . .
Professor Michael Clarke, Director General of the Royal United Services Institute said early indications suggest that the jet may have been destroyed by a bomb on the aircraft.
He told BBC Radio Five Live: ‘This aircraft was 200km north of its take-off zone, that means it was flying at around 31,000 feet. Terrorists, as far as we know, don’t have equipment to take down an aircraft at that height.
‘They have shoulder-launched missiles, known as man-portable missiles. They can get aircraft when they are taking off or landing, when they are going low and slow. But anything above 8,000 or 9,000 feet is out of the range of the weapons that they’ve got.’
He said the area where the jet crashed is a known location for groups affiliated to Al Qaeda and ISIS, but it was highly unlikely that a ground-based weapon was responsible for the in-flight break up.
‘Early reports said it split into two and that suggests a catastrophic failure, not a mechanical failure, but perhaps an explosion on board, so I would be much more inclined to think, if we have to guess at this stage, it is much more likely to have been a bomb on board than a missile fired from the ground.’
A terrorist attack in Egypt against a Russian airliner, at a time when Russian forces are engaged in defending Assad’s regime in Syria? We are seeing the consequences of a disastrous policy failure by the Obama administration, a failure in which Hillary Clinton is deeply implicated.
Breaking: 2007 War Protesters Reunite in Massive Protest Against President Sending US Combat Troops to Syria pic.twitter.com/nKtlrKq4nG
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 30, 2015
