I’m trying to make sense of this chain of confusion
surrounding the attack on our ambassador in Libya on September 11, 2012. You’d
think after more than a month we
could get a basic story. Instead we get obfuscation.
The President's Rose Garden Speech 9-12-2012 photo found here |
In the debate on Tuesday, Romney got the President to go on
record as saying he knew within 24 hours of the event that it was a terrorist
attack—the President even claimed he had said so at the time in his speech in
the White House Rose Garden and suggested checking the transcript. As if
moderator Candy Crowley was keeping a spare copy in a capacious handbag (she
did step in and incorrectly support the President, which she had to walk back
later).
Finding both a transcript and the 5-minute speech on video of the Rose Garden speech was no problem. I missed the word
“terror” the first two times I listened. Finally I found it with a careful
reading. It is, as the conservatives have been pointing out since, in reference
to the original 9/11 attack and terror attacks in general, which he brings up
in the previous paragraph, near the end of the speech, not, by my reading, in
reference to the Benghazi attack. What a silly thing to be arguing about. Even
when he calls something terrorism, he talks of it as simply a more heinous
crime than most crimes, and refers to bringing the specific perpetrators to
justice; he doesn’t recognize terrorism as an act of war perpetrated by our
nation’s enemies. So, even if he called it terrorism, which he didn’t, he
didn’t use the term the way the rest of us use it. But there’s still the obfuscation.
Throughout the Rose Garden speech he talks about the
anti-Muslim video that supposedly set off the spontaneous protest, a video that
logged only 17 YouTube views between being uploaded July 2nd and
September 10th, the day before the attack. Except—now we know there was no spontaneous protest. We also know that Charlene Lamb,
National Security agent under Hillary Clinton, was able to see video
surveillance of the attack in real time, so it was instantly known that there
was no protest springing up from a video. Unlike the same day in Egypt, there
was only a pre-planned thoroughly executed targeted attack—on the anniversary
of 9/11. There are reports that the administration had been warned of a possible attack 2-3 days ahead. And there are arguments about who had
failed to provide additional security, which may have been directly requested.
So, no video-related protest. Nor did intel ever suggest the obscure video was
related in any way; someone in the administration put that out without any supporting
evidence.
Hillary Clinton denounces the video on September 13th,
and repeats the claim September 14th. White House Spokesman Jay
Carney puts forward the video-protest story in a press briefing also on September
14th. UN Ambassador Susan Rice (an odd choice of spokesperson, since
she wasn’t in any chain of command in intelligence or national security) is
sent out to do the rounds of Sunday talk shows on September 16th,
with the instruction that she should insist the Benghazi attack was the result
of this obscure video. September 18th the President repeats the
claim on David Letterman’s show.
On September 19th, finally someone in the
administration admits they know it was an act of terrorism: National
Counterterrorism Director Matthew Olsen, to the Senate Homeland Security
Committee, says, “I would say yes, they were killed in the course of a
terrorist attack on our embassy.”
But then, on September 25th, yet another six days
later, a full two weeks after the event, Obama makes the claim six times in his
speech to the UN.
If he knew it was a planned terrorist attack (as we all knew
within 24 hours, so presumably the President was aware as well), why did he
insist on bringing up the irrelevant video at all, and why cling to that story
so relentlessly for so long?
More speculation and stories come out daily, so we don’t
really know the answer yet, but here are some of the speculations I’ve seen:
·
The President has a stake in putting forth the
idea that Islam ought to be protected (with many sub-speculations on why he
would take it upon himself to do that).
·
“Being hit with the worst terror attack since
9/11—in a city we saved—would have exposed Obama's boasting about his Libya
triumph and al-Qaida being "on the run" and "on the path to
defeat" as absurd propaganda.
Al-Qaida is now in Libya, Mali, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Pakistan….But we
can't let folks find that out until after Nov. 6.” (Pat Buchanan’s theory)
·
There was no security leak about Ambassador
Stevens’s location, his travel to Benghazi and a safe house; President Obama himself had arranged for Stevens to meet with Libyan rebels to negotiate for
the recovery of weapons the US had provided to them (during the Arab Spring
uprising?), and these rebels turned out to be his attackers.
·
Obama arranged with the Muslim Brotherhood to kidnap Ambassador Stevens, with the idea that, because of Obama’s warm
relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, he would save the day by arranging
for the Ambassador’s release—in exchange for secretly releasing the Blind
Sheik. But the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t go along with the original plan.
Some of these seem more suited for action-thriller fiction
than news. We don’t yet know the background of what happened. But I can
guarantee that there is no non-nefarious reason for the President of the United States
to make up as scapegoat an irrelevant video, telling and re-telling this
falsehood to the American people, and failing even yet to explain why.
I would like this question to come up at Monday’s foreign
policy debate:
Mr. President, since it is now known that the Benghazi attack
was a planned terrorist attack, and that this fact was known by the State
Department even as the attack was underway, why did the White House assert and persist in
the fiction that this was a spontaneous protest reacting to an obscure, almost
unviewed amateur video? It appears there was purposeful disinformation given to
the American people. Where did the claim of the video as cause come from (the agency,
position or rank, if you’d rather not reveal a name), and why was this claim
continued against all evidence for so long?
I would accept this alternative question (inspired by BryanPreston in reference to Obama’s book):
Mr. President, on page 261 of your book The Audacity of Hope, you declare that if the post-9/11 political
winds were to shift in an ugly direction against Muslims, you would stand with
them. In the Middle East on September 11, 2012, following a terrorist attack in
which our Ambassador was murdered along with three other American defenders, you
stepped forward to defend the Muslim World against an obscure anti-Muslim
video. How do we interpret your allegiance to America based on your words and
actions?
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