Category: Libya

Benghazi: The Unanswered Question

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Last week, American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. called and asked me to take a look at a Wall Street Journal op-ed column by Kevin G. Norton, “Benghazi’s Record of Broken Trust.”

Tyrrell asked me to contact Norton, which I did.  Tyrrell explained he was curious about a question: Where was Obama? You may remember Chris Wallace asked this last month on Fox News:

Strange to say, we still have no answer to that question:

Unlike Chris Wallace, most in the press corps have been willing to accept the administration’s non-answers, so that we are left with what Rich Lowry has called “a blank spot” in Obama’s presidency. And to invoke the famous words of the former Secretary of State, what difference at this point does it make? Perhaps not much to civilians stateside, who might be tempted to dismiss the whole affair as another political kerfuffle in Washington, but it means a great deal to those who devote themselves to serving their nation overseas. Just ask Kevin Norton.
“It’s bothered me ever since it happened,” the 36-year-old former Army captain says of the administration’s response to the Benghazi attack. “It makes no sense at all.”
Norton served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Third Infantry Division in 2005, and was reactivated for deployment to Afghanistan as a combat adviser in 2009. Like every other American soldier, Norton was trained to “leave no man behind.” He summarizes the common understanding of troops under fire: “Everybody knows that if the s—t hits the fan, they’re going to do whatever it takes to get you out of there.”
What happened in Benghazi, Norton said in a brief telephone interview, was an “egregious violation” of that basic promise our nation makes to its courageous men and women who put their lives at risk to serve America in potentially hostile foreign countries. Although it appears Ambassador Stevens and State Department aide Sean Smith were both killed before any U.S. forces could have rescued them, the same is not true of two former Navy SEALS, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. Both of them were part of a security detail that tried to save Stevens and Smith at the consulate, and were tasked with evacuating other Americans after the initial attack. Woods and Doherty were killed in a subsequent assault on the CIA annex in Benghazi. More than six hours elapsed between the first alarm from the consulate — “We’re under attack, we need help, please send help now” — and the attack on the annex in which mortar shells killed Woods and Doherty. By 4:30 p.m. Eastern time, Secretary Panetta was told of the desperate crisis in Benghazi and, about an hour later, Secretary Clinton called CIA Director David Petraeus to coordinate a response. Exactly why that response was insufficient to save the lives of Woods and Doherty remains hotly disputed. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

 


Ruh-Roh: Ambassador Killed by Secret State Department Weapons Program?

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Ex-Diplomats Report New Benghazi Whistleblowers
with Info Devastating to Clinton and Obama
— Roger L. Simon, PJ Media

Benghazi witness points finger at Clinton
on lapses in consulate security
— Julian Pecquet, The Hill

New whistleblowers coming forward on Benghazi?
— Ed Morrissey, Hot Air

Lawmakers dig into life-and-death issues of Benghazi
— Byron York, Washington Examiner

Breaking: New Crop of Benghazi Whistle-Blowers
Will Testify on Obama’s Missiles to Al-Qaeda Program
— Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit

Pretty serious stuff here, eh? If the latest reports are true, this is much more serious than who edited the talking points:

Ambassador Chris Stevens, killed along with three other Americans in the September terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, was reportedly attempting to buy back arms sold to Libyan rebels. Roger L. Simon of PJ Media reports that whistleblowers are prepared to testify that a State Department program of arming insurgents who overthrew Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi was the secret the Obama administration sought to conceal . . .
Such testimony, if verified, might help explain why Obama administration officials spent several days after the deadly Libyan attack — which occurred on the 11th anniversary of the 2001 9/11 attacks — promoting the falsehood that the four Americans killed in Benghazi died as a result of “demonstrations” inspired by a YouTube video.

You can read the rest at Viral Read and while, of course, I cannot vouch for information from Roger Simon’s sources, common sense actually argues on behalf of the story they’re telling, because this has been the Benghazi mystery all along: Why all the lies?

Was the State Department’s blame-the-video story just about protecting President Obama’s re-election chances? Maybe, but the intensity of the pushback seems a bit too much to be so easily explained by “politics as usual.” And this may be the Big Secret:

Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, [new whistleblower witnesses] will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.
Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.”
This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda – indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.
The former diplomat who spoke with PJ Media regarded the whole enterprise as totally amateurish and likened it to the Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson’s War about a clueless congressman who supplies Stingers to the Afghan guerrillas. “It’s as if Hillary and the others just watched that movie and said ‘Hey, let’s do that!’” the diplomat said.
He added that he and his colleagues think the leaking of General David Petraeus’ affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was timed to silence the former CIA chief on these matters.

Oooh! Hillary and her staff ignored the CIA’s advice and decided — with presidential authorization, of course — to provide arms to these shadowy “insurgents” anyway? And also, maybe, the takedown on Petraeus was part of an elaborate effort to cover their tracks?

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Nobody’s verified this stuff yet, but exactly what has Joe Curl been hinting at lately?

Care to guess where this stuff is leaking from? I could, but I won’t.

 

Shorter Dan Pfeiffer: ‘Your Partisan Questions Are So Largely Irrelevant and Offensive, I’m Not Going to Answer Them’

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When the White House sent Obama’s senior adviser out to do five Sunday shows, his orders were obviously to claim that (a) only Republicans care whether the administration is lying about Benghazi, and (b) the answer to any question about Benghazi is “largely irrelevant”:

Wallace repeatedly asked Pfeiffer where the president was and what he was doing while terrorists were attacking the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Pfeiffer refused to answer Wallace’s question of whether Obama entered the White House Situation Room during the Sept. 11 attack, saying, “I don’t remember what room the president was in on that night, and that’s a largely irrelevant fact.” . . .
On CBS Sunday, Pfeiffer said that the question of who edited the administration’s “talking points” about the Benghazi was “largely irrelevant.”

The Obama answer to everything: “Shut up, Republicans!”

Notice who is included in the Memeorandum aggregation on Daniel Halper’s Weekly Standard story: Rick Moran at PJ Tatler, Scott Johnson at Power Line, Ann Althouse, Doug Brady at Conservatives4Palin, Dan Riehl at Riehl World News, William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection and Andrew McCarthy at National Review. In other words, not a single liberal blogger or journalist considers it newsworthy that Obama’s senior adviser refused to say where the president was on the night of the Benghazi attack. This strategy of ignoring the obvious functions as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: If Democrats don’t pay any attention, interest in the administration’s scandals is therefore, by definition, strictly a Republican affair, and . . . “Shut up, Republicans!”

Tautologically confining any scandal to the category of “partisan fishing expeditions” (another Dan Pfeiffer talking point) does not, however, work as an explanation: If the answers to these questions are “largely irrelevant,” why won’t Pfeiffer answer the questions?

“Shut up, Republicans!”

 

Benghazi and Other ‘Concocted’ Scandals

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U.S. consulate, Benghazi, Libya, Sept. 11, 2012

“Fraud flows from the top down, not the mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do not call the shots — they carry out orders.”
— Andrew McCarthy

Well, that’s just “common sense,” but what does common sense count for nowadays? In an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN Thursday, Jay Carney dismissed the Benghazi scandal as a Republican “concoction.”

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom caught JournoLister Ezra Klein offering a similar argument that these aren’t really scandals, which sounds a bit like Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” talk:

“We lied about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, the Justice Department secretly seized phone records for the Associated Press, and the IRS used ‘inappropriate criteria’ to punish the president’s Enemies List, but these aren’t really scandals. Besides, those bitches deserved it. Shut up, Republicans.”

Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard pointed out the pervasiveness of the media’s “Not Really Scandals” meme.

As is usual when this kind of elite “consensus” groupthink agenda gets rolling, the consensus is itself cited as tautological proof that skeptics are irrational, biased and therefore untrustworthy. You’re a Flat Earther or a Tinfoil Hatter if you think there was a deliberate effort by the White House to suppress the ugly truth, or if you believe that such a cover-up would actually amount to a scandal.

“Polls show that nobody cares! Shut up, Republicans!”

But no matter what the polls say — low-information voters care more about celebrity mastectomies than about politics — it’s obvious the administration is lying about pretty much everything. For example, IRS officials tried to blame the problems on an alleged “surge” in non-profit applications that didn’t actually happen, and this bogus rationale was offered via a dishonest ruse that they lied about.

OK, so if the first public excuse was a lie,  and we then learn that this was revealed via a phony set-up question, and if every new fact we discover — “Tell us about your prayer meetings” — tends to make the situation seem worse . . . Well, what would we know if we knew everything?

We don’t know, and thus we must be cautious in asserting that we’ve found the “smoking gun” that will result in federal indictments, the resignation of a half-dozen Cabinet secretaries, perp walks for White House staffers and the Impeachment of the President.

On the other hand, when the best excuse Obamaphiles like Ashley Banfield can come up with is that the President of the United States doesn’t know anything about anything and his administration is plagued by rampant stupidity, we should probably keep asking questions.

“In the Obama era, the question isn’t whether you’re paranoid. It’s whether you’re paranoid enough.”
— Professor Glenn Reynolds

 

 


The Fate of Basseley Nakoula

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“Hillary’s promise of vengeance to the father of a fallen SEAL wasn’t that we’d get the jihadis who killed him but that we’d punish the filmmaker. That’s perverse, but in keeping with the fact that she decided to run ads on Pakistani TV apologizing for the film while Islamist cretins menaced American diplomats across the region.”
— Allahpundit, Oct. 25, 2012

The wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time: Nakoula was out on “supervised release” for a federal bank fraud conviction. He was $700,000 behind on restitution payments and operating under an alias when he made “The Innocence of Muslims,” a crappy movie that got turned into a YouTube video clip that in turn became the pretext of riots in Egypt and then — it is now generally acknowledged — was utilized as a flimsy excuse by the State Department in an attempt to distract from its embarrassing failures in the September attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Having become unintentionally famous, the con man Nakoula was arrested and hustled into federal court amid unusually high security two weeks after the Benghazi attacks. We need not wonder why Eric Holder’s Justice Department made this a top priority:

“We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
— Hillary Clinton, Sept. 14, 2012

There was a sort of argument last week between Ken White at Popehat and some conservatives who insist on calling Nakoula a “political prisoner.” Alternately, Rich Lowry calls Nakoula a “patsy,” but this really isn’t the argument we need to be having.

The Nakoula case isn’t about anyone’s free speech rights. The First Amendment doesn’t protect the right of convicted criminals to operate under aliases in potentially lucrative business while owing restitution to the victims of their earlier crimes. While I wholly endorse the right to speak truth about Islam — and to hell with any mob of violent savages who object — Ken White is correct that Nakoula is neither a “political prisoner” nor a heroic martyr for free speech.

But this isn’t really about Nakoula at all, is it?

What the case of Nakoula actually demonstrates is the strangely misplaced priorities of the Obama administration: Eight months later, they still haven’t caught any of the terrorists who killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, but they needed only two weeks to apprehend Nakoula.

Genuinely dangerous people seem to have no problem eluding federal investigators. Ariel Castro kidnapped women and kept them in his Cleveland basement for more than a decade, while the FBI never even considered the wife-beating school-bus driver a suspect. Nor was Castro the only menace to evade the FBI.

The good news? The feds are finally cracking down on those dangerous high-capacity pressure cookers. About damned time, too . . .

 

A Short Lesson in Liberal Media Bias: Has Alex Koppelman Forgotten Fitzmas?

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Scandals always highlight the disparity in how differently the media treat Republicans and Democrats. We are grateful to Alex Koppelman for this latest example:

It’s a cliché, of course, but it really is true: in Washington, every scandal has a crime and a coverup. The ongoing debate about the attack on the United States facility in Benghazi where four Americans were killed, and the Obama Administration’s response to it, is no exception. For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.
On Friday, ABC News’s Jonathan Karl revealed the details of the editing process for the C.I.A.’s talking points about the attack, including the edits themselves and some of the reasons a State Department spokeswoman gave for requesting those edits.

How many millions of words were wasted by liberal journalists on the phony Valerie Plame “scandal,” and who ever could have doubted that it was a Democrat “obsession” — a ginned-up mountain of paranoia inspired by a minor molehill of events?

Does no one else remember how liberals pretended that Valerie Plame’s employment status at the CIA was America’s most closely-guarded national security secret, until that afternoon in July 2003 when Richard Armitage mentioned her to Bob Novak? And have we completely forgotten that the real scandal — the story Novak was actually trying to report — was the mystery of how Plame’s husband Joe Wilson, a diplomat with no genuinely relevant expertise, got the assignment to travel to Africa on a CIA-sponsored trip to investigate British intelligence reports that Iraq had obtained uranium ore from Niger? Has it also now been forgotten that, because Novak would not identify his sources, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) launched a witch hunt that blamed Karl Rove and/or Dick Cheney for “outing” Plame, who was not exactly a secret agent, thus leading to an investigation that resulted in the prosecution and imprisonment of Scooter Libby?

For the love of God, have we forgotten “Fitzmas,” the 2005 rumor that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s federal grand jury was about to indict Rove or Cheney or both? Who could ever forget the ridiculous farce of “investigative journalist” Scott Leopold “reporting” in May 2006 that Rove had been indicted? I’ll bet Alex Koppelman recalls that fateful day — June 13, 2006 — when it was announced that Rove definitely would not be indicted.

All of that ridiculous “PlameGate” nonsense was taken very seriously by the mainstream media, as though it were a real scandal that might implicate the president in High Crimes and Misdemeanors, and yet it was transparently absurd from start to finish.

So fast-forward: Terrorists kill a U.S. ambassador and four other Americans in an attack on the consulate in Benghazi, and Obama administration officials — obviously concerned about political fallout during an election year — begin stacking up lies like cordwood. Everything we know about the matter leads to the conclusion that the administration failed before, during and after the attack, that they consistently lied at every step of the way, and that they’re quite likely still trying to hide the truth, especially in regard to who gave the “stand down” order to cancel a Special Operations rescue.

According to Alex Koppelman, however, this was just a “Republican obsession” until Jonathan Karl of ABC reported it, even though Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard had previously reported the same basic story about the edited Benghazi talking points.

Here’s a breaking story Koppelman might want to investigate: For a long time, it seemed like the idea of liberal media bias was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!





 

 

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#JayCarneyExcuses Don’t Make Me Give You The Full Jessup Again

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by Smitty

Is there an American who looks a bigger ass than Carney? None. None bigger ass.

Channeling Colonel Jessup:

The Big Benghazi Lie: State Department Deleted Key Facts From Talking Points

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Jonathan Karl of ABC News reports that an entire paragraph of the CIA’s original assessment of the September attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was deleted after political objections were raised by a State Department official. The deleted paragraph — which referenced prior CIA warnings about terrorist attacks in Libya — was one of numerous revisions made in the talking points:

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.  The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.
That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.
“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012.  “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”
Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

ABC has published an eight-page document showing the 12 versions of the administration’s Benghazi talking points.