Another interesting turn reported by Fox, that the rest of the media will ignore in favor or running a zillion more stories on Bridgegate. Or maybe they’ll spend some time discussing the ins and outs of the Justin Bieber egg-throwing scandal:
On the eve of the terrorist attacks that killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, the Obama White House may have exaggerated the scope and depth of President Obama’s preparation for such attacks, newly declassified documents show.
On Sept. 10, 2012 — the day before Al Qaeda-linked terrorists carried out the bloody assault on the U.S. consulate and a related annex in Benghazi — the White House Press Office issued a press release entitled “Readout of the President’s Meeting with Senior Administration Officials on Our Preparedness and Security Posture on the Eleventh Anniversary of September 11th.”
A set of “Top Secret” documents obtained by Fox News reveals that the nation’s highest-ranking uniformed military officer, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to Congress in executive session last year that the Sept. 10 meeting “was actually a conference call.” Moreover, Dempsey testified, Libya was never even discussed during the call, despite a persistent and increasingly worrisome stream of threat reporting from that country, and from Benghazi in particular.
The Sept. 10 press release stated that the session had covered the “specific measures we are taking” and “steps taken” to protect Americans and U.S. facilities abroad. It also related an order from President Obama for all agencies to “do everything possible to protect the American people, both at home and abroad.”
Yet the declassified documents show that Dempsey testified to the Congress last year that not a single directive had been issued by him or Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to adjust American military force posture anywhere in the world as the 9/11 anniversary loomed just hours away.
This is becoming easier to understand and explain. It doesn’t even need a gun-running component, though one may be involved.
In the fall of 2012, the Obama White House was focused on re-election to the point that it was shutting its real duties out. President Obama was shutting his own real duties out, campaigning far more than governing. He hadn’t met with his jobs council in months. He was skipping his daily security intel briefings. The Sept. 10 release was sent out to make him look presidential, without actually performing the duties of president. There was no security meeting, and no forces were actually moved around anywhere to gear up for the 9-11 anniversary. There was a conference call, a conversation, and a press release.
The administration had been warned that security in Benghazi was deteriorating and an attack was likely and would be deadly, repeatedly. The black flag of Islam was already flying over government buildings in Benghazi. Ansar al-Sharia, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Libya, was gaining power. Terrorists had already attacked the Red Cross and the British embassy in Benghazi, forcing both to abandon the city. The last remaining target of three that al Qaeda had stated its intent to attack was the US facility. But Clinton’s State Department consistently denied requests to beef up security, and Obama couldn’t be bothered to give a damn about anything but winning re-election.
The attack happens. It’s clear from the beginning that it was an attack, the military briefed administration officials that it was an attack, but the State Department had been denying field requests from Benghazi to beef up security, and there’s a paper trail of those denials. Obama hasn’t been attending to his daily intel briefings. Obama, derelict in his duty every bit as much as Clinton, has been campaigning on the theme that “al Qaeda is defeated and on the run.” Well, here they are to spoil that particular campaign line and re-write their own in the blood of four Americans.
The inconvenience of four dead Americans could not be allowed to become speedbumps slowing Obama’s path to re-election.
The White House has never disclosed where Obama was during most of the attack. His spokesman consistently deflects questions regarding Obama’s whereabouts that night. It’s likely that he spent at least part of the duration of the attack not acting as commander in chief with Americans’ lives on the line, but as campaigner in chief with his campaign on the line. The outcome of that meeting was tasking the political people with coming up with some kind of story — any kind of story — to preserve the “al Qaeda is on the run” line and deflect from the State Department’s abandonment of security at the facility. They had a problem of duty on their hands, and approached it as a problem of politics. The “Innocence of Muslims” film had been a minor factor in the pre-planned Cairo riot, so they latched on that.
We know that the State Department’s Victoria Nuland and deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes were involved in re-working the talking points that President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, spokesman Jay Carney and Ambassador Susan Rice used — the talking points blaming a movie and mischaracterizing the attack as a riot gone bad. Rhodes came to the job with no foreign policy experience. He is a long-time Obama loyalist whose specialty is not foreign policy, but strategic communications. He’s a speechwriter. Politics, basically. Spin.
Nuland is a career State officer but she and Rhodes were both political appointees to the jobs they held at that time (Nuland has been promoted since Benghazi), one answering to Clinton, the other, ultimately, to Obama. The political team, on Obama’s and Clinton’s orders and under their direction, comes up with the fairy tale that a movie caused the violence, Rhodes and Nuland get the job of transmitting that fairy tale to the officials who are crafting the administration’s response, and a massive lie is rolled out and defended for weeks, by the president who most stood to benefit from that lie’s existence.
Once told, the lie can never be un-told.
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