Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she has reviewed “well over 200″ threat warnings that applied to the Benghazi mission before the Sept. 11 attack that killed four Americans.
“Now, it couldn’t say at a certain time or on a certain day. There had been prior attacks. It’s well known, the attack on the British ambassador, attack on the Red Cross. They both pulled out for a period of time,” she said today on CBS’ Face the Nation.
The Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman also noted homemade improvised explosives that had been thrown over the fence in April and caused some damage to a wall, “which is not much, but it’s an indication.”
“If you look seriously at the intelligence, the country is spotted with training camps. The country is a magnet for all of these groups, and there is a kind of lawless history about the Benghazi area, also,” Feinstein added.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), appearing with Feinstein, agreed that “the intelligence was good.”
“I mean, the threat stream was very clear leading up to that 9/11 event,” Rogers said, noting that two days later al-Qaeda affiliates killed four Tunisians protecting the U.S. embassy there.
“The intelligence said, hey, they’re looking for Western targets. They want to be more aggressive. All of that was right. What I find just absolute gross negligence was that they did not take the right precautions to protect the ambassador and the consulate employees,” he said. “Nor did they have the right plans in place to get them out. And that’s what, I’ll tell you, this is a serious, serious event here.”
Feinstein confirmed that Ambassador Chris Stevens “was unhappy” with security. “Some improvements were made. They were, clearly, inadequate improvements,” she said. “And the outside security departed when they saw people with guns coming down the street. We looked at the video and saw that.”
The senator said she believes the intelligence community should not have prepared the talking points given to UN Ambassador Susan Rice to take on the Sunday news shows.
“Additionally, I think somebody should have picked up the phone and called and said to a survivor, ‘tell me the story, what happened,’ the next morning,” Feinstein said.
If, as the administration claims, you have to pull al-Qaeda out of talking points because it might “jeopardize a contact or something else,” you shouldn’t even come out with public talking points in the first place, she said.
“And that’s why if you have to do it this way you shouldn’t do it,” Feinstein said. “There shouldn’t be public talking points.”
And yet our boy Mitt let himself get bullied by none other than Candy, that’s the one, Candy Crowley from pushing on Benghazi. It’s all water under the bridge now, Obama’s got the, how’s he put it, flexibility to do whatever the he’ll he wants.
Romney is your “boy?”
Benghazi is over. Susan Rice provided the “black face” for major white Republicans to get antsy at and obsess over, although she has absolutely nothing to do with the decisions of Benghazi. BTW, the present economic crisis has everything to do with the black people at ACORN, not the white people in Wall Street Finance and government…it’s that line of thinking.
Not that Jarrett planned it this way. When she and O overruled the Intel and decided the attackers must be protesters over the film, because what religious radicals would attack the O???—or whatever happened, Jarrett apparently later decided Rice would be the patsy for the disinformation, because Rice being at the UN provided the cover that she was out of the loop. Why else send the UN Ambassador to center stage. I really doubt Jarrett planned the Republican-Limbaughian race game would come to play. After showing the Rice was a liar, the rRepublicans, maybe spurred by Limbaughian rants, kept at her. Even after she id’d the “intel community” the Repubs still went after her rather than tracing names and playing detective. Even the vain McCain said Rice was not the real issue, still the Rice obsession continued. Only then, late in the game, did the Dems catch on and started playing the race card about Rice, because they were dealt it by the Repubs.
Currently the Repubs are desperately trying to salvage their economic cult that tax-cuts-for-the-rich-pay-for-themselves by blaming and raiding (again) Social Security, so if they do find something more on Benghazi, they can trade that to Obama for giving into their crank Bush economics.
The Democrats will never go after Obama on foreign policy issues because such would call into question all of their own beliefs that they are all foreign policy experts.
LOL……….you bite hard, dude…………… )’(
LOL? Three days later, where is the Republican follow-up on the individuals in the so-called “intelligence community” who fed Rice the disinformation? Boehner et al. are too busy trying to “work with” Obama to prove Republicans will rip off Social Security and Medicare revenues worse than Obama and Obamacare.
yes, the threat stream to obama’s reelection was entirely unacceptable.
So they had to lie, and lie, and lie and……
What a disgrace this country is.
The thugs in charge of Washington are more than a disgrace. They are DANGEROUS in the extreme.
And it is of piece with their revolutionary leftist and Islamist bent that Benghazigate is the biggest heist/conspiracy/scandal in US history.And Watergate will become nothing more than a one yr old’s game in comparison. And the stakes are so enormous it is entirely possible that some will find themselves under the bus, and I am speaking literally.
The implications for the Pyromaniac-in-Chief, his surrogates and some very DEADLY Mid East players renders them desperate and highly incendiary too – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/11/29/benghazigates-stink-bombs-steadily-creeping-to-the-fore-regardless-of-the-regimes-spinmeisters-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
And there is more to come, in addition to the above.Holy smokes!
On 9/11. Obama was incompetent. Clinton was incompetent. Rice was incompetent. Petrausas was incompetent. Stevens was incompetent. And paid for it with his life and the lives of other Americans.
Why? So Obama could be President. Power makes us insane.
Have some more Kool-Aid Difi, you seem to be deficient, out of touch with the degenerate remnants of the so-called “Democratic Party”.
Never in my long life have I been so disgusted with my government’s handling of a completely avoidable tragedy than I am with Benghazigate. The stench of the cover-up makes it even more appalling. The media’s complicity in that cover-up is utterly despicable.
I fear nothing come from this but more stonewalling and obfuscation. Obama and his handlers are masters at that game.
Feinstein, one of the loudest and most unscrupulous anti-Second Amendment bigots in the entire feral government, suddenly wishes men with guns had been ordered in to protect a U.S. ambassador?
That peculiar smell in the air seems to be a combination of leftist extremist hypocrisy and the craving for more—more and more and more—attention.
I’ve never had any use for Feinstein but she deserves credit here, at least she is voicing questions.
Agreed.
I was surprised to read these comments of hers. I stopped my TV subscriptions years ago. That’s why I like PJMedia.
The whole thing about this “administration” is literally shameful…no other word for them, now emphasized at Benghazi, she couldn’t stomach this last straw. Wonder is, how many other Democrats might be closeted and will never come out like she did.
And, remember, Dear Readers, remember all of this in future while the voters shrug this off, and our Media support this conduct……for the next four years unless Obama can somehow be impeached.
Four Americans dead. Who ordered the stand down?
Good question !! A question which will probably never be answered. And the media won’t ask.
It was either jarrett or obozo, most likely jarrett, since she’s the brains, so to speak, behind the man- child’s governing idiocy, particularly with respect to foreign policy.
One of my fondest dreams is for this scandal to blow wide open and have it take ozero and all his crooked cohorts down and either imprisoned for life or hung in a public execution for treason.
I can dream can’t I?
Obama is scum.
What was Stevens really doing in Benghazi on 9/11 and why won’t anyone in Congress (R or D) ask the question? Very interesting multi part series based on 100 hours of interviews with an Intellience Insider, see Canada Free Press, an excerpt:
“After Gaddafi was taken out, there was the matter of his weapons and arms that were hidden all over Libya, including chemical weapons – gas weapons. According to Obama and Hillary Clinton, we were in Libya to collect and destroy these weapons to make for a ‘safer’ Libya. That’s what they were telling the American public. That’s not really what was going on, though, and it seems like all of the other nations except the average American knew it. Anyway, you can find pictures and videos of weapons caches being destroyed, but that is strictly for the public’s consumption.
What was really happening, before Gaddafi’s body was even cold, is that we had people locating caches of weapons, separating the working from those that weren’t, and making a big show of destroying the weapons, but only the weapons that were useless. The working weapons were being given to Islamic terrorists. They were being funneled through Libya, crisscrossing Libya on a Muslim Brotherhood managed strategic supply route. In fact, Michael Reagan called it the modern day equivalent of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in a recent article he wrote, and he is correct.
The entire arms and weapons running operation was headquartered in Benghazi, The weapons were actually being shipped out of Libya from the port city of Dernah, located about a hundred miles east of Benghazi. That was the ‘choke point’ of the weapons being shipped out. Remember the Lusitania? Think in those terms, ships carrying weapons hid among ‘humanitarian aid.’ By the time of the attacks, an estimated 30-40 million pounds of arms were already transported out of Libya…”
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/51346
I don’t know what to believe anymore but I certainly have no confidence in Congress or The Administration and the press, what a joke, Pravda anyone?
“The senator said she believes the intelligence community should not have prepared the talking points given to UN Ambassador Susan Rice to take on the Sunday news shows.”
This makes no sense at all. General David Patraeus, Director of the CIA, said under oath that they knew immediately that this was a terrorist attack and that it had nothing to do with a cheap video. If that’s the case, and if the State Department stated that they were watching the events unfold in real time on video and said that there was no protest about a video, then how did those talking points make it to Rice? If Patraeus was so certain and said so the day after the attack, then why was a different story given to Rice?
That’s because there WAS no protest in Benghazi over a video and everybody knew it. Somebody at the White House changed the story and Axelrod et al. probably thought the mainstream media would just go along with the story (which they almost did). If it wasn’t for FOX News and a few reports from CBS, none of this information would have made it out. And somebody in the State Department kept turning down the ambassador’s repeated requests for more security, yet we never really get to know who that “somebody” was. It’s time to put Hillary Clinton under oath and make her answer the tough questions regarding Benghazi. Not that we’ll get the truth.
It only takes one person to spill the beans. I hope we find that person real soon.
In that highlighted canadafreepress.com article is the statement by the “Insider”,
“Make no mistake, we are doing the bidding for Saudi Arabia. The U.S., NATO and other allies are engaged in a proxy war with Iran and Russia.”
The statement is made in the complicated context of America doing the bidding of the Saudi’s against the Russians (being Saudi rivals for that market) who’re the World’s largest producer of oil, and Syria was receiving those clandestinely shipped arms from a Libyan port via an “operation” at a “safe house” in Benghazi, all with the connivance of our CIA, to thwart the Syrians who’re the allies of the Russians.
I know, I know….but, read this in the original from that highlighted link above, and see if you don’t agree with my synthesis.
This total “outsider”‘s gut feeling tells me that this is a lot of spun B.S.
Make up your own minds. Tom Clancy couldn’t, wouldn’t,make this up. Make up your own minds. It’s truly hard to know what to believe, and this is literally our America, right now.
I don’t buy in to everything in the article but the question still remains, are we running guns to the Syrian “rebels” and if so, shouldn’t the American people know what our government is doing? Many of the “rebels” both in Libya and Syria are not friends of the US, they are enemies with ties to terrorists. There is no doubt that if this happened under the previous administration, the press would expose it and run the story 24/7, what do we hear? crickets…..
Dismiss it as a Tom Clancy novel if you wish and you can dismiss the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US but there is no doubt, there are those with ties to the MB in our government and visiting the White House. Something is very wrong.
All I know that if Obama and his people say it, I do NOT believe a word of it.
Why has Hilary been jetting around the world and avoiding any questioning on Benghazi? Because she can.
LET’S HANDLE EVERYTHING OUTTA WASHINGTON. LET’S DO AWAY WITH EMBASSIES AND THOSE LITTLE PEOPLE ON THE GROUND.
I mean, if we can’t believe an ambassador who’s in a country he’s the ambassador of, who’s telling us about the danger he’s in, about the security he needs, why believe anything he says? Clearly this person can’t be trusted.
I’m not just talking about Benghazi, but Tanzania an Kenya, as well — you know, the countries who’ve had their American embassies fried by Rice.
Remember when Susan Rice said this after the horror of Rwanda:
“‘There was such a huge disconnect between the logic of each of the decisions we took along the way during the genocide and the moral consequences of the decisions taken collectively,”"I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.’”*
Driven by guilt about their inaction back then, she becomes instrumental in the recommendations to Obama about getting involved in Libya.
Sadly, in leftist fashion, they did and then moved on. The clear fact now the Ambassador and the team there were literally begging for their lives in the last few months is sickening.
*A great background article by Samantha Power in the September 2001 Atlantic Monthly gives some insight into Rice’s early formative experience.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/09/bystanders-to-genocide/304571/?single_page=true
You can bet your a^^ that if Ambassador Chris Stevens was a black american , the Obama administration would have sent in the 82nd Airborne, the marines, the Green Berets and the Navy Seals to rescue him.
This regime is the most flagrantly racist and bigoted group of folks since Woodrow Wilson.
The two saddest facts about the continuing story of the Benghazi attack:
1: The media coverage is all about what Susan Rice said or didn’t say about the incident. Conveniently, and seemingly completely, lost in the discussion, is the fact that four Americans are dead due to the political naivete and incompetence of this administration.
2:The American public seems not to care about this story, at all.
As a civilian I can figure this all out. Not protecting Americans on foreign soil was completely careless and a tragedy. To cover it up is criminal. But my question is when are we going to strike back? It’s almost three months and we still have not done nothing. Is President Obama hoping it all goes away?
The solution is clear. Have Bob Costas declare on the next Libyan sports broadcast that its country’s gun control measures are too weak. Voila! No more Mideast violence, folks!
In my opinion, every informed person understands what has occurred
in Benghazi. The real question is why Congress has not taken appropriate action against those responsible, namely, the State Dept,the Administration, and possibly Intelligence Agencies.. Ms Rice is incidental to any investigation as she only learned of the incident after the fact, not that she should be given any job based on her idiotic front for the WH. There was clear incompetence, or worse, prior to the attack, during the attack, and the attempted cover-up after the attack. Why hasn’t an independent Counsel been chosen to make the appropriate non-partisan investigation ? That to me is the big question. Is this all going to be swept under the rug by an inept Congress?
“Is this all going to be swept under the rug by an inept Congress?”
The short answer is Yes, just like they’ve avoided acting on every other incompetent and illegal thing this President has done.
“There shouldn’t be public talking points.”
No, there shouldn’t. Ever. DUH! That’s what people are so sick of! That’s why so many like it when people like Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Donald Trump, or Chris Christie, actually say what they mean, mean what they say, and JUST SAY IT!!! We are SICK of being jerked around with idiotic “talking points”. They need to be reminded somehow, that THEY WORK FOR US!
Thank you for keeping the Benghazi policy response by the Obama Administration to the forefront of America’s national consciousness.
The response and coverup are clearly treasonous comportment by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Ms Rice.