By: John Hayward
10/2/2012 02:19 PM
There’s no way that even the most biased media can continue covering for the utter incompetence of the Obama Administration. They got people killed in Libya, and they’ve been lying to the American people for weeks. Critical mass on this story has been achieved; cracks are appearing in the media embargo; and it’s now utterly laughable to thaw out the media action line from September 12, which held that Mitt Romney made some sort of horrible “gaffe” by criticizing the Administration’s conduct.
Eli Lake at the Daily Beast reports that there were actually two bombing attempts on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi over the past five months. The Administration is not advancing this information – it’s coming from whistleblower testimony before the House Oversight Committee. Lake pieces it together at the Daily Beast:
For example, following a May 22 early-morning attack on a facility that housed the International Committee on the Red Cross, a Facebook page claimed responsibility, and said the attack was a warning and a “message for the Americans disturbing the skies over Derna.” That reference was likely to American surveillance drones over a city that provided fighters to al Qaeda in Iraq in the last decade.
In June a Facebook page associated with militants linked to the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi posted a threat to Stevens based on the route he took for his morning jog. The Facebook page also posted a picture of Stevens. The letter to Clinton notes that “after stopping these morning runs for about a week, the Ambassador resumed them.”
A senior State Department official contacted for this story said the ambassador was “not reckless” with his own security or that of his staff. But this official also acknowledged that the ambassador was “an old-school diplomat” and strongly desired to have as few barriers between himself and the Libyan people.
The letter also discloses for the first time a bombing at the U.S. consulate that occurred on April 6, 2012. It says that on that day, two former security guards for the consulate in Benghazi threw homemade improvised explosives over the consulate fence. That incident resulted in no casualties.
The Wall Street Journal first reported last month that on June 6 militants detonated an explosive at the perimeter gate of the consulate, blowing a hole through the barrier. The letter to Clinton quotes one source who described the crater as “big enough for forty men to go through.”
The June attack was fairly common knowledge (to everyone except Obama’s national security advisers, apparently) but the April item is a shocking new revelation, particularly since Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans ended up getting fatally betrayed by their Libyan security guards.
This testimony led House Oversight chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and National Security subcommittee chair Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) to send a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking why repeated requests for increased security from the Benghazi consulate were ignored.
“Based on information provided to the Committee by individuals with direct knowledge of events in Libya, the attack that claimed the Ambassador’s life was the latest in a long line of attacks on Western diplomats and officials in Libya in the months leading up to September 11, 2012,” states the Oversight letter. “It was clearly never, as Administration officials once insisted, the result of a popular protest. In addition, multiple U.S. federal government officials have confirmed to the Committee that, prior to the September 11 attack, the U.S. mission in Libya made repeated requests for increased security in Benghazi. The mission in Libya, however, was denied these resources by officials in Washington.”
The letter lists even more incidents than the direct bombing attacks against the Benghazi consulate, including an RPG attack on the Red Cross headquarters only a kilometer away. Taken together, “these events indicated a clear pattern of security threats that could only be reasonably interpreted to justify increased security for U.S. personnel and facilities in Benghazi.” The House Oversight Committee is asking for written, documented responses to hard questions about how much of the security situation was known to the State Department, and exactly what communications occurred between Washington and the main U.S. embassy in Tripoli.
Oh, and the lead suspect in the Benghazi attack, jihadi mastermind Muhammad Jamal Abu Ahmad, was sprung from Egyptian prison, along with all sorts of other militants, as a direct result of that “Arab Spring” President Obama loves to rhapsodize about. Hopefully the crew Obama is releasing from Guantanamo Bay will do a better job of keeping their noses clean.
It looks as if CNN has had just about enough of the Administration’s serial falsehoods and ever-evolving “narrative” on the Benghazi attack. They actually used the C-word: Cover-up. CNN correspondent Elise Labott said that “in the days after the attack – in fact, the day after the attack – my sources were telling me this was a pre-planned, military-style assault, with indications there were terrorists involved.” She contrasted this with the false talking points about “spontaneous protests” pouring out of the White House, and said no source available to her, or CNN, ever provided information to support the official Obama Administration narrative.
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To read more about the Benghazi Embassy attacks, click here.
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