Benghazi Boondoggle

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 2^nd and September 10^th, 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 13^th, and repeats the claim September 14^th. White House Spokesman Jay Carney puts forward the video-protest story in a press briefing also on September 14^th. 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 16^th, with the instruction that she should insist the Benghazi attack was the result of this obscure video. September 18^th the President repeats the claim on David Letterman’s show.

On September 19^th, 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 25^th, 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?

Another Bad 9/11

Eleven years after 9/11/2001. It was another disturbing day. Attacks on two of our embassies, in Egypt and Libya. American lives were lost: Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other embassy personnel in Benghazi. While this attack looks planned and timed for the 9/11 anniversary, it is unclear who perpetrated it. The supposedly spontaneous mob attack in Egypt, combining Islamist radicals and teenage soccer fans, may or may not have been coordinated.

But the two attacks are supposedly the result of anger over a YouTube video. Not something the US has sanctioned. Not something the diplomatic corps did wrong. Not even something many Americans are aware of. (No stories I’ve seen have named or linked any video, nor is any such video likely to still exist online, if it was real.)

An embassy, let’s be sure we understand, is the same as the embassy’s home country soil. An attack on an embassy is an attack on the US itself. Any country so attacked is understood to be authorized to retaliate. Civilization requires that we keep sacred our respect for one another’s diplomatic spaces.

To put it another way, if two armies were on the field of battle and one sent out a white flag, an indicator of a desire to speak and consider terms, the enemy would allow safe passage for the ambassador, the messenger with the white flag. What happened yesterday was surrounding the messenger and attacking him, and then cheering that they’d succeeded in killing off a particularly stupid enemy who’d allowed himself to get close enough for attack. Savage jackals behave this way; civilized humans do not.

So what will be the retaliation for this attack upon our sovereign soil? Not sure yet, but the US Embassy in Cairo (a representative of this administration and its policies) responded with this apology:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others. [Emphasis mine.]

The actions of errant videographers are firmly rejected, but there’s not even a weak rejection of the embassy attackers, who were guilty of violating basic laws of civilization. Instead there’s something like, “Oh, we totally understand where you’re coming from. Who wouldn’t savagely attack an embassy when there are offensive things on the internet?” And that last line seems to miss the irony that free speech was much more abused by the attackers, who want to control the speech of everyone around the world, than by some puny individual who may have stepped over a line of good taste. Maybe the video actually is so egregious that a person could be prosecuted for slander, but that hardly qualifies as an excuse for declaring war, which these attacks do.

For good summaries of the attacks, I suggest this Newsmax piece, as well as this commentary by BryanPreston of PJMedia.

What has been happening over the next day or so is telling. Following Tuesday’s administration apology to Egypt and promise to support Libya in bringing perpetrators to justice, Mitt Romney said this:

America will not tolerate attacks against our citizens and our embassies. We will defend, also, our Constitutional rights of speech, assembly, and religion. We have confidence in our cause, and in America. We respect our Constitution. We stand for the principles our Constitution protects. We encourage other nations to understand and respect the principles of our Constitution, because we recognize that these principles are the ultimate source of freedom for individuals around the world.

He also condemned Obama and the administration for their apology and non-response. You probably should view his comments in their entirety, here, because the mainstream media has taken it upon themselves to support the Obama administration in condemning Romney for jumping in before all the facts are known, and you might not get the full context from them.

Romney responded to media outrage (with no apology) that it’s never too soon to stand up for our principles. You have to have principles to know how to respond based on principles, which explains something about Romney’s need to school the administration.

In the meantime, Obama is tinkering with military nearby and trying to quell the obvious assumption that he’s as effective as Carter was the last time we had an ambassador killed (1979). But he didn’t want to interrupt his campaign fundraising schedule, so while dead Americans are still being prepared to be shipped home for funerals, he jetted off to speak to wealthy donors in Las Vegas.

And did we mention that there was one more irritant for Obama on 9/11? Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu asked to speak with him later this month, probably related to Israel’s intentions to protect itself from Iran’s growing nuclear threat. But what with campaign season on, Obama told him he couldn’t fit him in the schedule.

I am not making this up.

We’ve seen 3 ½ years of Obama’s often puzzling other-than-pro-American policies. We don’t know why these are his policies. Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2016 is an attempt to explain, often using Obama’s own words, which we may need to start believing: “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction” (The Audacity of Hope, p. 161). Maybe he simply means he would stand up against anti-Muslim bigots. But since most Americans are with him on that, why would he need to stand up against America to do it? And when there’s hugely offensive anti-American bigotry—acted out with death and mayhem by people who call themselves Muslims—why can’t we count on our elected president to use at least a little pro-American backbone at a moment such as this? If he could lead, wouldn’t this be an opportunity, rather than an inconvenience during the campaign?