First, some irony that captures the Obama administration’s Benghazi deception.
CNN: Stevens worried about AL Qaeda his list
CNN: Clinton: No sign that Stevens believed he was on an al Qaeda hit list
This adminstration has lied from day one about the Benghazi attacks.
And that narrative went something like this:
1. There was no security failure at the consulate. The attack was birthed by a spontaneous protest gone bad — so how could we have known?
2. Obama’s brag before the country that al-Qaeda was on the road to defeat just five days before the Benghazi attack remains true. After all, this wasn’t a terrorist attack, it was a protest gone bad.
3. Obama’s Middle East policy of disengagement and assuming his own awesomeness would buy us goodwill with radicals worked. After all, these massive, deadly protests in two dozen countries have nothing to do with anti-American sentiment; the bad guy is a Coptic Christian filmmaker who insulted Muhammad.
I’ll reiterate that this is how a cover up works. You don’t tell the truth and you don’t lie; what you do is manufacture a false narrative built on misleading statements that aren’t outright lies. As you can see, many of the statements made by President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Jay Carney, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice are loaded with caveats and escape hatches: “Based on what we know…” and “What we do know is…”
Defenders of the President and his administration officials will and are using these escape hatches to defend the intentional spinning of a patently false narrative. But there’s absolutely no question that for a full week this false narrative — a glaring lie of omission — was also used to strike down, downplay, dismiss, and distract from any raising of the question that what might’ve happened in Benghazi was the work of terrorists.
Moreover, this narrative was so intentionally stifling and oppressive, it wouldn’t even allow room for an either/or possibility. The lie of omission was that no administration official told us that what happened “could’ve been” or “might’ve been” a terrorist attack. Quite the opposite. The narrative was used to tell us the raising of that possibility was outrageous.
This, even in the face of numerous news outlets reporting just a day or two after the attack that terrorism was a likely motive. On September 12, both Fox News and CBS News reported the possibility, and on September 13, CNN joined in.
And yet, this narrative lie of omission that was used to scape-goat this filmmaker and to shout down anyone who even entertained the notion of terrorism, remained firmly in place until Sept. 20, the day Jay Carney finally admitted it was “self-evident” terrorism was behind the attack.
Al Qaida did all but call Barack Obama and provide him the details of the attack:
The new information disclosed in the letter obtained by The Daily Beast strongly suggests the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the late Ambassador Chris Stevens were known by U.S. security personnel to be targets for terrorists. Indeed, the terrorists made their threats openly on Facebook.
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.
Additional security had reportedly been requested :
Two House Republicans say they have been informed by whistleblowers that the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was attacked and threatened 13 times before the incident last month that killed four Americans.
Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a letter on Tuesday that detailed the whistleblowers’ allegations.
“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,” Issa and Chaffetz wrote. “It was clearly never, as Administration officials once insisted, the result of a popular protest.”
The congressmen said the consulate asked for more security to deal with the growing threat but was turned down by the administration.
“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.”
Apparently the request was denied despite previous assaults on the consulate
“…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 White House had “no comment.”
Maybe missing half of his security briefings was a bad idea.
President Obama is touting his foreign policy experience on the campaign trail, but startling new statistics suggest that national security has not necessarily been the personal priority the president makes it out to be. It turns out that more than half the time, the commander in chief does not attend his daily intelligence meeting.
The Government Accountability Institute, a new conservative investigative research organization, examined President Obama’s schedule from the day he took office until mid-June 2012, to see how often he attended his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) — the meeting at which he is briefed on the most critical intelligence threats to the country. During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent — falling to just over 38 percent. By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubw5N8iVDHI[/youtube]
Maybe if Obama had spent less time tweeting Beyonce he might have learned that 20,000 stinger missiles went missing after he bombed Gaddafi to hell. Maybe if Obama spent a little less time downing bubbly from Jay Z’s $105,000 tower of champagne and hanging with Pimp with a Limp Obama might have learned that Al Qaida was so well armed that it controls 300,000 square miles of Mali.
Meanwhile, the fall of Gaddafi caused his arms dumps to be thrown open, flooding Libya with illegal weapons. Unsurprisingly, extremists from across the region seized their opportunity. “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” the North African branch of bin Laden’s terror network, plundered this new source of weapons, becoming so well armed that it was able to capture 300,000 square miles of Mali earlier this year, in concert with local allies.
Maybe Obama might have caught on to Al Qaida’s flag flying over Benghazi last November.
The flag, complete with Arabic script reading “there is no God but Allah” and full moon underneath, was seen flying above the Benghazi courthouse building, considered to be the seat of the revolution, according to the news website Vice.com.
The flag was said to be flying over the building alongside the Libyan national flag but the National Transitional Council has denied that it was responsible.
Vice.com also reported that Islamists had been seen driving around the city’s streets, waving the Al Qaeda flag from their cars and shouting “Islamiya, Islamiya! No East, nor West”.
Now we come to Valerie Jarrett. The Iranian born Jarrett reportedly has her own Secret Service detail, highly unusual according to Keith Koffler. A US Ambassador in traveling to Benghazi doesn’t deserve the security protection of the US Marines but a senior aide warrants Secret Service protection even while on vacation?
Obama owes this country an explanation, but there’s little doubt about what happened in the aftermath of the Benghazi tragedy. Obama has become accustomed to an entirely compliant and unquestioning press and without a doubt tried to spin the story and steer it away from the truth. The anticipation was that the press would run with the official administration story and to a large extent that is what is transpiring now.
In the interim, Valerie Jarrett ought to be sent to Benghazi to staff the consulate with the same protection Obama provided for Ambassador Chris Stevens.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.