Saturday, September 29, 2012

The Benghazi scandal widens

The Benghazi scandal widens
By: John Hayward
9/28/2012 11:59 AM

ABC News broke the mainstream media embargo on the Obama Administration’s outrageous conduct in the Benghazi consulate attack, with a report by Jake Tapper on World News Tonight:

Over at Fox News, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was even more direct in identifying and criticizing an Obama Administration cover-up. “I think it’s because they have this narrative that they defeated al-Qaeda,” he said on Sean Hannity’s show. “They never say the words ‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. They want to wish it away. The President was moving on to Asia – he was going to declare this a great victory for himself, and unfortunately, this terrible act of terror intervened in their very convenient narrative.”

“This is a cover-up,” Giuliani continued, citing his long experience at unraveling cover-ups and conspiracies. “This is a deliberate attempt to cover up the truth, from an Administration that claimed it wanted to be the most transparent in history. And it’s the worst kind of cover-up: the kind of cover-up that involves our national security. This is a cover-up that involves the slaughter of four Americans. And maybe if they had been straightforward about this from the very beginning, maybe they could have quelled some of these demonstrations that took place afterwards, that also did a tremendous amount of damage.”

Giuliani was unsparing in his criticism of Obama’s empty-chair management style: “Right now, we don’t have a President. We have a candidate. It’s really a shame. The world is in turmoil. The Middle East is erupting. Every night, when I watch television, I see the failure of Obama’s policies in the Middle East – his naïve approach to Islamic extremist terrorism, that many of us have been warning about for a very, very long time.”

The horrendous lapses in judgment by this Administration leading up to the Benghazi attack are highlighted by the fact that, even though the Administration keeps describing the consulate as a crime scene under the control of the FBI, in reality FBI agents haven’t been able to get there yet, 15 days after the attacks… because the area is deemed too unsafe for them. But a couple of Libyan guards and an unsecured safe house were good enough for the U.S. Ambassador, even though he was known to have voiced concerns about his safety?

But the conduct of the Administration after the attacks is nothing less than a world-class scandal. There is nothing else any reputable journalist should be interrogating Obama and his minions about. President Obama has deep, difficult questions to answer about this deliberate cover-up, and the political motivations behind it.

We’ve learned that the Administration actually deleted damning State Department memos from the Internet, in which State expressed the view that it had “no credible information to suggest that al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group is plotting any kind of attack overseas to coincide with the upcoming anniversary of September 11.”

We’ve got days of Administration shills hitting the airwaves to claim the Benghazi attack was an “Innocence of Muslims” protest that grew out of control, even though this was always a patently absurd assertion, and completely at odds with what the Libyan government said all along. We have confirmation that the Administration knew this was, in fact, a terrorist attack within 24 hours.

And the Administration was misleading Congress, not just sending White House spokesmen and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice forth, to lie into the faces of the American people. Three days after the attack, the House Intelligence Committee was fed the “out-of-control video protest” line, prompting “shocked” reactions from representatives who knew this was a false narrative, based on their own review of intelligence data.

Meanwhile, Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) says the Senate Foreign Relations Committee received a “worthless” briefing, and suspects “there has to be something that they’re trying to hide or cover up.” He said the situation is “turning into something not short of Benghazi-gate.”

It’s not just Republican members of Congress saying this, either. Senator John Kerry (D-MA) chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, which has sent a bipartisan letter to Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, requesting “an accounting of the attacks against U.S. missions in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen,” according to the Washington Examiner which notes “the letter marks the first time congressional Democrats have so directly expressed their dissatisfaction with the administration’s response to inquiries about the attacks.”

According to Time magazine, the latest mutation of the Administration’s increasingly twisted and confused spin is that the terrorists who attacked the Benghazi consulate were “seizing the opportunity presented by protests in neighboring Egypt against an American-made anti-Islamic video.” This is based on the seven-hour delay until mortars were introduced into the attack. “They went and they got their buddies and they got their most lethal weapons and they brought it to bear. And ultimately that contributed to the lethality of the attack,” said an anonymous Administration official.

Which is not at all what the Administration has been saying for the past two weeks. Obama and his people were not out there telling us that a long-planned attack on the Benghazi consulate was ramped up because the terrorists caught the news from Cairo, and realized it gave them a perfect opportunity to cook up a cover story that the Obama Administration would happily swallow and regurgitate.

That’s what Time’s Administration official is saying, right? ”Hey, Achmed, do you realize today is September 11? I had totally forgotten about that! This would be a perfect time to finally kill that pesky American ambassador. And hey, what’s this? They’re rioting in Cairo over a movie! Quick, bring the mortars! Those idiots in the Obama State Department will happily believe we’re just angry about the film. They’ll probably be telling their people about it for days. Why, I’ll bet their President will still be going on about that stupid movie when he talks to the United Nations!”
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To read more about the Benghazi attacks, click here.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.

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