Sunday, May 05, 2013

White House Knew Benghazi Was a Terror Attack Even as It Claimed Otherwise
Even as the White House strove last week to move beyond questions about the Benghazi attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2012, fresh evidence emerged that senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what had happened in the days following the assaults. The Weekly Standard has obtained a timeline briefed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailing the heavy substantive revisions made to the CIA’s talking points, just six weeks before the 2012 presidential election, and additional information about why the changes were made and by whom.

As intelligence officials pieced together the puzzle of events unfolding in Libya, they concluded even before the assaults had ended that al Qaeda-linked terrorists were involved. Senior administration officials, however, sought to obscure the emerging picture and downplay the significance of attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. The frantic process that produced the changes to the talking points took place over a 24-hour period just one day before Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made her now-famous appearances on the Sunday television talk shows....

Benghazi Impeachment Suddenly Not So Far-Fetched
...Barack Obama is bloody lucky he’s a Democrat, because if he were a Republican, he’d be in deep trouble right now, close to the brink of extinction. Only his increasingly pathetic loyal media claque can save him. It will be interesting to see if they do so at the expense of their own reputations.

Of course the reputations of the State Department need to be considered as well, that same State Dept that, according to Hayes (and this is corroborated by emails he publishes), bowdlerized and censored all references to al-Qaeda involvement in the Benghazi events before they could reach the fragile American public in an election year, almost even as they were happening. This was before Susan Rice made her dog-and-pony performance on the Sunday shows, asserting it was all caused by a video nobody watched, and long before the oleaginous Candy Crowley famously covered up for Obama on Benghazi at the presidential foreign-policy debate.

Hayes names the names of some of the State Department miscreants involved in this repellent anti-democratic censorship. Among them is one Victoria Nuland, who makes Pinocchio seem like Diogenes. (You can find a video of her as well as some droll tweets from the blogger Ace of Spades demanding an explanation for all this prevarication, and even a tweet from me, here.)

But it’s not just State. According to Hayes, on the CIA side, a fellow named Mike Morell, their deputy director, “cut all or parts of four paragraphs of the six-paragraph talking points — 148 of its 248 words. Gone were the reference to ‘Islamic extremists,’ the reminders of agency warnings about al Qaeda in Libya, the reference to ‘jihadists’ in Cairo, the mention of possible surveillance of the facility in Benghazi, and the report of five previous attacks on foreign interests.”

So why did this all happen? Who were they covering up for, hiding Islamic terror involvement? Post-Boston, it seems particularly despicable, even if it was already bad enough with all the death and injury to U.S. service personnel who risk life and limb to defend our freedom.

But never mind. We are in a fascinating period of unraveling. Whistleblowers in the defense community are appearing. I’m sure at State, some are looking over their shoulders, waiting for the “Night of the Long Knives” to begin. It probably has already....