President Obama was in the White House, meeting with SecDef Leon Panetta and VP Joe Biden, on the night of the Benghazi assault. Emails came into the Situation Room describing the attack as an attack, with no reference to any riot or movie. CIA agents in the battle called for help but were denied three times.
Given all of these facts, plus the fact that the CIA has officially washed its hands of any denials of help, it’s reasonable to ask what the president knew and what he did during that fateful battle. He is the commander in chief and he was in place to act as such during an attack on Americans. But according to the White House spokesman, President Obama is not participating in the investigation.
“He has not participated in the investigation,” Carney told the press in response to a question about whether Obama was participating. “He is anticipating results that show us exactly what happened and how is responsible and what lessons we can learn from it and ensure it never happens again. He expects the investigation to be rigorous.”
Obama knows what he knew and what he did that night. There is no need to “investigate,” he just needs to tell the truth. The idea that he expects any “investigation” in which he is not participating to be “rigorous” is absurd. But it’s purposeful absurdity.
As if that wasn’t enough to tell us that this administration has no intention of ever telling the truth, recall that Hillary Clinton of missing Rose Law Firm records infamy is controlling the department’s “review” of its actions before and during the assault.
Well, State is going to review that review before the American people learn anything of it.
The State Department’s acting Inspector General Harold Geisel wrote an Oct. 26 letter, obtained by The Cable, to Senate Homeland Security Committee heads Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME), outlining several reviews his office has already started and some they are about to start to determine if embassy security around the world is sufficient, being implemented properly, and if that was a factor in the attack that killed Amb. Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
One of their tasks will be to keep tabs on the proceedings of the State Department’s own review of the Benghazi attack, which is being conducted by an Accountability Review Board (ARB) led by former Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering and including former Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen.
“Inspectors will monitor the implementation of any recommendations from the Benghazi Accountability Review Board (ARB) report and will review them as future inspections are conducted,” Geisel wrote.
This will obviously push any public rendering of verdicts well past the election. It is all nothing but an exercise in classic cover-up management foot-dragging, a sport in which Hillary Clinton is a world expert and for which she deserves a lifetime achievement award.
It all begs the question, just what is the Obama team really hiding?
The explanations range from the obvious — Obama sought to cover-up al Qaeda’s resurgence in the Libya (and Egypt, and Tunisia) that he helped create — to the edgier — the plausible possibility that Stevens was running guns to Syria and the deal went south — to the even edgier — that there is some purpose for which the administration either allowed or even encouraged the attack for some as yet unknown reason. The administration’s obvious stonewalling keeps all of these theories and more alive.
Barack Obama promised to lead the most open and transparent administration ever. Remember that?
You write:
Now there is an important point that I highlighted in my comment to this morning’s Bridget Johnson column here at the Tatler, and that derives from the latest revelations about the phone call received at 9.30 PM in Tripoli by the deputy of the Ambassador:
Just to help us to understand:
the deputy chief mission in Tripoli received a call at 9.40 PM.
Local time ?
This would be the afternoon here in America (East coast).
Are we focusing on this point ?
If the hours we are talking about are LOCAL (Tripoli)time, the calls to Washington did not arrive in the middle of the night, but in the afternoon. All offices staffed, everybody at work in the Administration, at any level.
I will be back after checking the time zones.
A first look at the time zones tells me that Tripoli is
6 hours ahead of Washington DC.
9.40 PM in Tripoli would be 3.40 PM in DC.
No calls in the night, no problem in contacting anybody and everybody.
Or am I taking something wrong ????
No, you’re right. The Obama-Panetta-Biden meeting started at 5 pm local time, and by then emails from the battle were already coming in.
When Obama promised the “most transparent administration in history” he was obviously thinking more along the lines of invisibility cloak than accountability.
What they’re hiding is Obama’s decision to do nothing.
Shameful.
I don’t foreclose that there were delays, filterings, and f*ups short of the POTUS, but none of that matters, does it.
To engage in a bit of conspiracy theory, it seemed awful quick to blame all the riots and the assault on a movie no one had heard about. It’s almost as if the administration knew of the video ahead of time. Could someone associated with the regime have leaned on the guy to make the movie? Then, when it hits the intertubes and notice goes out to the professionally aggrieved, riots ensue. The purpose? To help push for that global treaty to ban blasphemy. This regime has shown it is no friend of the Second Amendment, using Fast & Furious as a means to undercut it (though it went horribly wrong) and this would be a way to undercut the First Amendment (which the administration is no fan of either.)
So when Dear Liar gets reports of an attack in Benghazi, he simply assumes it’s a riot in the mold of Cairo, and thus doesn’t act.
“There is no need to ‘investigate,’ he just needs to tell the truth.”
The only way you’re going to get the truth from Obama is to catch in an off-the-cuff moment. Other than that, when you see Obama’s face in front of a mic he will be lying either by commission or omission, depending on the question.
You know what would instantly return credibility to the American press and turn 60 Minutes and reporter Steve Kroft into heroes? If this Sunday’s broadcast were nothing but Benghazi. Kroft and 60 Minutes certainly have a justifiable reason to go after the Liar in Chief hard and bring him down. After all, it was on Sept 12, the day after the Benghazi disaster, that Obama looked Kroft (and the American people) straight in the eye and lied. If I were a reporter with even a molecule of dignity and professional respect, there is no way in hell I’d let that go without a fight.
Somebody in the last day or so has written that the objective of the “investigation” doesn’t have anything to do with the truth. Exactly the opposite. The objective is to find the lie that is most likely to be accepted by the public. Another element of that is just to delay, with the expectation that interest lessens as time passes.
All we are doing is beating a dead horse – we already know this is a cover up, we already know that the president allowed those Americans to die and also ordered a rescue force to stand down, we know that video/audio exists to substantiate these charges…We know all these things.
Time is running short and unless SOME ELECTED LEADER steps up and takes charge of DEMANDING these tapes become public knowledge, we will miss our best opportunity to run this crowd out on a rail. We need a PATRIOTIC LEADER to announce a demonstration-protest on the Capitol steps with enough advance notice to gather as many pissed off Americans as can make the trip. I believe it would dwarf anything the Washington Mall has ever seen and could NOT be ignored by the MSM.
Time is wasting.
REMEMBER BENGHAZI!!