One of the White House’s First Responses During the Benghazi Attack: Call YouTube

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Bryan Preston:

While Ambassador Chris Stevens was missing on September 11, 2012, and while Tyrone Woods, Sean Smith and Glen Doherty were fighting for their lives, with military assets within a quick flight to provide aid, the Obama White House decided to call…YouTube.

A still-classified State Department e-mail says that one of the first responses from the White House to the Benghazi attack was to contact YouTube to warn of the “ramifications” of allowing the posting of an anti-Islamic video, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The memo suggests that even as the attack was still underway — and before the CIA began the process of compiling talking points on its analysis of what happened — the White House believed it was in retaliation for a controversial video.

The subject line of the e-mail, which was sent at 9:11 p.m. Eastern Time on the night of the attack, is “Update on Response to actions – Libya.” The was written hours before the attack was over.

Issa has asked the White House to declassify and release the document. In the meantime he has inserted a sentence from the e-mail in the Congressional Record.

“White House is reaching out to U-Tube [sic] to advice ramification of the posting of the Pastor Jon video,” the e-mail reads, according to Issa.

U-Tube?

What did the White House want YouTube, a privately-owned website, to do?

Wouldn’t a call to the military have been more appropriate?

The White House spin on this is that the memo shows that senior officials genuinely believed that the video had caused the attack. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, it was always obvious that the attack was pre-planned. It was also obvious that the movie was being used by terrorists who had major plans for the unrest they were causing.

None of that excuses anyone at the White House for continuing to blame the video for weeks after the attack. It doesn’t excuse Hillary Clinton for blaming the movie with the bodies of the dead resting behind her, on September 14, 2012, and vowing to jail the filmmaker. It doesn’t excuse Ambassador Susan Rice blaming the movie, and it doesn’t come within a country mile of excusing Barack Obama for saying this to the UN on September 26.

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Anyone logged into You Tube can ”ding down” any video.
The WH had other options.
It could have woke up Obama and got him to sign the Cross Border Authorization so we could fight the terrorists back.
But no.
As if an immediate pulling off of the video might have cooled the anger of the Islamists.
Doesn’t Obama realize anger is just their excuse?

Personally, I believe that the administration had found the video earlier and were saving to be the scapegoat for any attacks happening before the election.

chb

2012: Obama Wanted to Scale Back Pursuit of Al Qaeda, Intel Community Said No

According to The Daily Beast, the Obama administration produced “a National Intelligence Estimate” in 2012 that said “Al Qaeda was no longer a direct threat to America.” However, Defense Intelligence Director General Michael Flynn led a charge against that estimate, and was joined by other figures and agencies in the intelligence community. “Flynn and others made it clear they would not go along with that assessment.”

Obama set the tone for the National Intelligence Estimate with his 2012 State of the Union, when he said: “Al Qaeda operatives who remain are scrambling, knowing that they can’t escape the reach of the United States of America.”

Yet “during the last year alone, Al Qaeda has established safe havens in Libya, Syria, and Iraq.”

Even in the face of this reality, the Obama admin continues to spurn the idea of taking the “War on Terror” back up. Instead, an anonymous intelligence official says pressure is still coming “from the top…that Al Qaeda is all these small franchise groups and they are not coordinated or threatening.”

Perhaps the reason the White House refused to send a rescue mission to Benghazi, was that it was his first chance to scale back the Pursuit of al Qeada. If they admitted that the Embassy had been hit by known al Qeada affiliated forces, it would have spoiled the illusion of his staged magic trick (Now you see al Qeada, now you don’t). So he decided to try the old magician tool of misdirection.

“Squirrel!”

(Or in this case “Video!)

I’d be willing to bet that there’s a way to back-date email.

@DaNang67:

If you mean changing the header time and day information, it would require changing system time and date on the main computers the email is routed through: The originating computer, it’s server, the server computer(s) of the recipient, and each recipient. (If the email travels to other countries, there would likely be additional servers involved).

Or you could go in after the fact and hack the header information, but for absolute consistency” you would have to do that each of those computers individually, which would also require access to those computers.

The NSA or CIA could probably do it, but it hardly seems realistic that you could get that level of conspiracy and keep it a secret. Nor does there seem that much to gain by going through all that trouble.

Unfortunately, this got me thinking; that the problem with the Washington DC progressives support for the allowing all these government agencies, ever expanding open backdoor access into all of a network’s users, (including cradle to grave information data mining,) without requiring individual and specific search warrants, means that it may make it easier for nefarious government (or infiltrating) hackers to plant or falsify digital evidence. The more you know about a person the easier it becomes to get past their passwords or security questions. If they can remotely gain backdoor access to a person’s computer without that person’s knowledge, it is becomes possible for a spook agency or political hacker operative to plant “evidence” of criminal activity on that computer. (Child porn, assassination or terrorist plans, connections with various criminal organizations, the possibilities are rife for abuse.) I admit that may sound like a paranoid “tin hat theory”, but it is also very, very possible.

Ditto
IT GAVE ME A THOUGHT, what’s his name who worked for NSA and left to RUSSIA,
was in position to find the conversation, he could have done it,
because this was hard to resist, being in the position and having the tools to find it,
AND WITH THAT IN HAND HE COULDN’T LIVE IN HIS COUNTRY WHO HAVE TRAITORS AS LEADER,
THE ONE WHO DID NOT SAVE THE BRAVES AND THE ONES SUCKING HIM FOR MONEY BEHIND HIM,
HE JUST GOT DISGUSTED AND LEFT ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT,
IT’S A MOST PROBABILITY, THAT IT HAPPENED,

@ilovebeeswarzone:

I do believe Bees that Snowden actually was deeply concerned with the Federal government’s treating American citizens as criminals with no right to privacy. It is something the concerns a Constitutional conservatives. I suspect that he knew that the only way he could expose the Federal government’s abuses as a whistle-blower was from exile. It is unclear how history will remember him as this is a battle for freedom that is ongoing.

Ditto
yes, i like what you explained,
it a bit like the TEA-PARTY movement, they are demonizing them,
and they cannot take away the patriotism they truly have for their AMERICA,
THAT’S WHERE THE CITIZENS SEPARATE THE TRUE AMERICANS FROM THE OTHER,
no matter how high is the accuser, he loose credibility, the minute he accuse the conservatives,
because they all are,
I was watching another video of RON PAUL, and it told us that he only he could have won his election,
he had won the heart of the youngs without even promissing nothing,
that is an accomplishment by itself, much of it which was hidden to us, so to block his victory assured,
and now we know why OBAMA WON, the youths could not let him go, IT SHOW HE WAS THE ONE TO TAKE THE PRESIDENCY, AS IF HE WAS CHOSEN BY GOD HIMSELF,
I REMEMBER ARGUING WITH ONE OF HIS BELIEVER, AND BY GOD HE WAS RIGHT ON,
even RON PAUL numbers where botch by establishment, well they paid the price,
for blocking him so disonestly,
just to say the right one always get vindicted at the end, and truth come out, so to shame the one who did wrong to the people, by obstructing the course of events, and blinding the people with words,
i wish i could bring that YOU TUBE here to show you,
bye

@Ditto: Congress is probably not even getting electronic copies of the emails anyway. If they were, hacking the header on the single sent message would probably serve to protect the propaganda piece from further scrutiny. Congress probably lacks the power or initiative to investigate the received email from the You Tube recipient, let alone all the intermediate servers.

Look, just knowing the people involved, it’s certain that the video story was contrived by the political arm of the White House. We also know that there was no demonstration in Libya. The email to You Tube establishes the impossible theme that the White House honestly believed that the video/demonstration theory was part of real consideration rather than a contrived red herring. It’s more likely that someone printed an email with a bogus date to give cover to the idea that they were confused as to the nature of what was taking place in Libya at the time.

Congress will never check to determine the legitimacy of this “evidence”. The press certainly won’t question it. The greatest extreme anyone would need to go to in the rare event anyone questioned the email’s legitimacy is to have someone to be ready to acknowledge receiving it in the rare event that anyone should question it.

@DaNang67:

I was wondering what particular email you were referencing. The smoking gun email is already out there. It’s too late for them to hack that header, Congress already knows when that email was sent, by whom and to whom. However, when you’re talking about evidence, the problem in hacking the header of an email that is already on a computer, is that you have to know how to hack much more than the header to pass the computer forensics smell test, and that requires a high level of expertise. (I know, I’ve taken computer Forensics taught by a cyber crimes expert.) Once an investigation discovers an incriminating email the next step is to get a court search order for the computers involved. Forensics will discover very quickly whether the email is genuine or has been tampered with using deep examination of the .eml file properties that simply can not be hacked.

@Ditto: I love smart people with technical knowledge. Thanks for enlightening me.

I was referencing the email the White House just announced which was supposedly sent to You Tube during the attack in Benghazi. It tends to support the proposition that the White House believed the “video-caused demonstration evolving into an attack” theory at the time.

It later occurred to me that Congress never received an electronic version of the email anyway. If they did, they don’t have the resources to investigate the integrity of such an item. The administration controls most of the sophisticated investigative resources.