Everyone who has followed this story has always suspected that blaming the YouTube video was a political ploy. It was obvious, actually, just as it remains obvious why Hillary Clinton did everything she possibly could to keep any notion of accountability for her own decisions at arm’s length. That’s political, too. She has a crown to run for in 2016. It won’t do to have her negligence that resulted in four dead Americans become a speedbump on her path to power. Why let a little thing like incompetence stand in the way of ambition?
Emails sent by senior White House adviser Ben Rhodes to other top administration officials reveal an effort to insulate President Barack Obama from the attacks that killed four Americans.
Rhodes sent this email to top White House officials such as David Plouffe and Jay Carney just a day before National Security Adviser Susan Rice made her infamous Sunday news show appearances to discuss the attack.
The “goal,” according to these emails, was “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy.”
The “goal,” therefore, was to lie convincingly enough to get the president re-elected. It takes a special coldness to tell that lie with the bodies of the dead in coffins behind you. Hillary Clinton managed that without a trace of a conscience to slow her down.
Rice came under fierce criticism following her appearances on television after she adhered to these talking points and blamed the attack on a little-watched Internet video.
The newly released internal White House e-mails show that Rice’s orders came from top Obama administration communications officials.
“[W]e’ve made our views on this video crystal clear. The United States government had nothing to do with it,” Rhodes wrote in the email, which was released on Tuesday by the advocacy group Judicial Watch.
“We reject its message and its contents,” he wrote. “We find it disgusting and reprehensible. But there is absolutely no justification at all for responding to this movie with violence. And we are working to make sure that people around the globe hear that message.”
It’s well to remember at this point who Ben Rhodes is. According to the White House, he is assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and speechwriting. That sounds nice, but he has no career in the military or intelligence. Rhodes is a career partisan Democrat and Obama loyalist who was put on the National Security Council because he is a loyalist to the man. Not the nation. Or the facts on the ground in Libya or anywhere else. Rhodes’ loyalty belongs to Barack Obama.
He needs to be compelled to testify under oath about all this.
The Pentagon had determined early on that Benghazi was a pre-meditated and planned terrorist attack. They told administration officials that. They were overruled by Barack Obama’s loyalist political officer, and administration officials from the president down lied to the American people and assaulted our freedom of speech so that Obama might win re-election and Hillary could succeed him.
Ben Rhodes the speechwriter coldly orchestrated a cover-up, but, as you’ll see on the next page, he wasn’t alone.
Also contained in the 41 pages of documents obtained by Judicial Watch is a Sep. 12, 2012 email from Payton Knopf, the former deputy spokesman at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.
In this communication, Knopf informs Rice that senior officials had already dubbed the Benghazi attack as “complex” and planned in advance. Despite this information, Rice still insisted that attacks were “spontaneous.”
The newly released cache of emails also appear to confirm that the CIA altered its original talking points on the attacks in the following days.
Then-CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell is identified as the person who heavily edited the critical fact sheet.
“The first draft apparently seemed unsuitable … because they seemed to encourage the reader to infer incorrectly that the CIA had warned about a specific attack on our embassy,” states one email. “Morell noted that these points were not good and he had taken a heavy hand to editing them. He noted that he would be happy to work with [then deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton] Jake Sullivan and Rhodes to develop appropriate talking points.”
Tatler readers know that there had been a specific warning regarding the embassy in Cairo, Egypt the day before both it and the facility in Benghazi were assaulted. That warning destroys any notion that a YouTube movie motivated either attack, as Cairo preceded Benghazi, and the motivations for the attack in Cairo were clear. It was not about a movie. The terrorists who attacked the embassy in Cairo wanted to force the U.S. to release the blind sheikh who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center attack. What did the terrorists who attacked Benghazi shortly thereafter want? Why did they attack that facility, and did they know that the U.S. ambassador was there? Where was Barack Obama while Ben Rhodes was directing a cover-up? Why was the military not allowed to respond?
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