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?
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