Benghazi is no ‘sideshow’

[Dos Equis]

Great commentary. 

Benghazi is no ‘sideshow’
By: David Harsanyi 
5/13/2013

Notwithstanding the passionate protestations of President Barack Obama, it is possible that an issue can be both “politicized” and have merit.

And as we now know, it was the White House and State Department that had politics on their mind during the initial attacks. Why else would they edit CIA Benghazi talking points 12 times – eliminating all references to terrorism – before allowing the American people to hear them? And why else would White House spokesperson Jay Carney claim that there was only a single “stylistic” edit to the document? We know this is untrue.  An untrue statement  triggered by political considerations.

And here is what President Barack Obama had to say on that Benghazi talking-point issue this afternoon in a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

The whole issue of talking point, frankly, throughout this process, has been a sideshow. We have been very clear about throughout that immediately after this event happened we were not clear who exactly had carried it out, how it had occurred, what the motivations were. It happened at the same time as we had seen attacks on U.S. embassies in Cairo as a consequence of this film and nobody understood exactly what was taking place during the course of those first few days. And the e-mails that you allude to were provided by us to congressional committees. They reviewed them several months ago, concluded that in fact there was nothing awful in terms of the process that we had used. And suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there is something new to the story. There is no there there.

Almost all of this is untrue or misleading.

Perhaps there is no “there there,” as the president asserts, but there are a few things for certain: The administration, and Obama, took forever to make it “very clear” that the murders in Benghazi were the work of terrorists. Both implicitly and explicitly, they spent most of their media time trying to pin the blame on that preposterous Islam-bashing YouTube video. The administration asked YouTube to take the offending video down.

Despite knowing full well that the Arab Street hadn’t had one of its routine “spontaneous eruptions” of rage, but rather that a concerted terror attack had been to blame, Hillary stood in front of the families of the deceased and said: “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with. It is hard for the American people to make sense of that, because it is senseless and totally unacceptable.”

Katie Pavelich has an excellent timeline here of various administration officials cynically blaming the video for the death of Americans. An attack on reality (not unusual) and the First Amendment (becoming less unusual). As you know, Hillary doesn’t think it matters very much why the carnage went down.

As a political matter, the administration has done its best to conflate two distinct issues: The attack and the cover-up.

Yes, we should do all we can to find ways to protect foreign service members abroad. Did we do all we could to save them? It seems that’s a legitimate question that hasn’t been fully answered.

Then there is the accusation of a “politicization” of the event. To this charge, Democrats argue: ‘Why would we do it? There is no reason to cover up anything.’ Which is demonstrable false. There are two very good reasons.

1 –  There is the political implication of appearing weak during an election. Obama has told is that the ‘Man-Caused Disaster’ problem is almost licked. To have to pop up, and to make Obama engage in a defense of the Libya  adventure and revisit the War on Terror. This, weeks preceding an election, would have been bad politics. There was every reason to deflect attention from the root cause.

2 –  Then, to a lesser extent  perhaps, is the  ideological need to blame Islamic terror on our own “hateful” speech, or supposed Islamaphobia. For weeks, the Obama and friends fed that very perception.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/05/13/the-benghazi-sideshow/

[Dos Equis]

More great commentary. 

Posted on May 13, 2013 by John Hinderaker in Benghazigate
Obama Bobs and Weaves on Benghazi

President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron held a brief joint press conference this morning. After the introductory comments, the first questions related to Benghazi and the IRS. Here is some of what Obama had to say about Benghazi:

With respect to Benghazi, we’ve now seen this argument that’s been made by some folks primarily up on Capitol Hill for months now. And I’ve just got to say — here’s what we know. Americans died in Benghazi. What we also know is clearly they were not in a position where they were adequately protected. The day after it happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.

This is the Candy Crowley defense. On September 12, Obama delivered remarks on the Benghazi attacks in the Rose Garden. He said nothing at all about the origin or genesis of the attacks and did not comment on the video that soon emerged as the alleged cause. Early on he said, “Yesterday, four of these extraordinary Americans were killed in an attack on our diplomatic post in Benghazi.” Thereafter he referred several times to the “attack,” without attributing it to an angry mob of movie critics, al Qaeda elements, or anyone else. Near the end of his remarks he said:

No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.

That’s it. This generic reference to “acts of terror” obviously did not represent an acknowledgement that the Benghazi attacks were carried out by al Qaeda affiliated terrorists as opposed to a mob, as the administration soon began to claim. It was after Obama’s generic “acts of terror” reference that Susan Rice made the rounds of the Sunday morning shows blaming the phantom video, and it was later still when Hillary Clinton, to her everlasting shame, told Charles Woods, at the memorial service for the four murdered Americans, “we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”

The whole issue of talking points, frankly, throughout this process has been a sideshow. What we have been very clear about throughout was that immediately after this event happened we were not clear who exactly had carried it out, how it had occurred, what the motivations were. It happened at the same time as we had seen attacks on U.S. embassies in Cairo as a consequence of this film. And nobody understood exactly what was taking place during the course of those first few days.

This is simply a lie. From the earliest moments when the desperate Americans in Benghazi called Washington to relay what was happening, they made it clear that they were under attack by armed terrorists. There was no protest, no demonstration, no movie criticism. Obama knows that perfectly well. (The attacks in Cairo were not precipitated by the YouTube video either, but that is another story.)

And the emails that you allude to were provided by us to congressional committees. They reviewed them several months ago, concluded that, in fact, there was nothing afoul in terms of the process that we had used. And suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there’s something new to the story. There’s no “there” there.

Classic Obama. What Congressional committees concluded several months ago that “there was nothing afoul in terms of the process that we had used”? And what does that even mean? The emails are in the news because they were revealed by Steve Hayes, and they plainly show that Obama’s State Department eviscerated the accurate information that was provided by the CIA, and substituted meaningless generalities that Susan Rice took as her cue to lie on five separate news programs.

Keep in mind, by the way, these so-called talking points that were prepared for Susan Rice five, six days after the event occurred pretty much matched the assessments that I was receiving at that time in my presidential daily briefing.

This would be frightening if it were true, but of course it isn’t. No doubt the CIA told Obama the same thing they reported in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attacks: they were a planned terrorist assault, carried out by al Qaeda elements.

Who executes some sort of cover-up or effort to tamp things down for three days? So the whole thing defies logic. And the fact that this keeps on getting churned out, frankly, has a lot to do with political motivations. We’ve had folks who have challenged Hillary Clinton’s integrity, Susan Rice’s integrity, Mike Mullen and Tom Pickering’s integrity. It’s a given that mine gets challenged by these same folks. They’ve used it for fundraising.

Sometimes the misdeeds of which a politician accuses his opponents are revealing, because they tell us how the politician himself really thinks. This is a case in point. There is every reason to challenge the integrity of Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton, based on the lies they told about Benghazi. But in Obama’s mind, the only possible reason for criticizing the performance of an elected or appointed official is “fundraising.” In his world, that is probably true: for Obama, fundraising is always the bottom line. But some of us actually care when an American ambassador and three colleagues are slaughtered by our bitterest enemies.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/05/obama-bobs-and-weaves-on-benghazi.php

[Soul Crusher]

Obama is still lying.

[Vince G, CSN MFT]

Couldn't win the election with Benghazi.....can't win any public opinion or care now.  Even Robert Gates of all people has spoken out against the waste of time into the matter saying correctly that the GOP has a cartoonish reality in regards to military response

[240 is Back]

Obama is still lying.

Obviously.   But unless congress will sack up and impeach his ass over it... it's going to be a non-issue in 2016.  Obama leaving on a helicopter as Hilary sworn in.

[Archer77]

Seems like Benghazi is the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the Obama presidency. 

[whork]

Couldn't win the election with Benghazi.....can't win any public opinion or care now.  Even Robert Gates of all people has spoken out against the waste of time into the matter saying correctly that the GOP has a cartoonish reality in regards to military response

+1

[240 is Back]

Seems like Benghazi is the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the Obama presidency. 

Except the Repubs in 1998 had the balls to impeach.

In 2013, they're scared to take that route.  mccain and graham said its off the table.  Wimps.

[Fury]

Couldn't win the election with Benghazi.....can't win any public opinion or care now.  Even Robert Gates of all people has spoken out against the waste of time into the matter saying correctly that the GOP has a cartoonish reality in regards to military response

Robert Gates has also said he has no idea what actually went on so his opinion means jack shit.

[Soul Crusher]

Couldn't win the election with Benghazi.....can't win any public opinion or care now.  Even Robert Gates of all people has spoken out against the waste of time into the matter saying correctly that the GOP has a cartoonish reality in regards to military response

Gates Is full of shit.   They had no idea how long the attack was going to last at the time and didn't even try. 

[blacken700]

who knows more Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates or the getbig Secretary of Dumbfense    the stupid party



Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates forcefully defended the Obama administration on Sunday against charges that it did not do enough to prevent the tragedy in Benghazi, telling CBS' "Face the Nation" that some critics of the administration have a "cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces."

Gates, a Republican who was appointed by then-President George W. Bush in 2006 and agreed to stay through more than two years of President Obama's first term, repeatedly declined to criticize the policymakers who devised a response to the September 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

"Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were," said Gates, now the chancellor of the College of William and Mary.

"We don't have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible." he explained.

Suggestions that we could have flown a fighter jet over the attackers to "scare them with the noise or something," Gates said, ignored the "number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from [former Libyan leader] Qaddafi's arsenals."

"I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances," he said.

Another suggestion posed by some critics of the administration, to, as Gates said, "send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous."

"It's sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces," he said. "The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm's way, and there just wasn't time to do that."

[GigantorX]

Robert Gates has also said he has no idea what actually went on so his opinion means jack shit.

Yeah....that kinda makes his opinion moot, I mean, not knowing any details about the situation you're speaking about can make your words ring hollow.

[Soul Crusher]

Hey moron - get this through your thick head - at the time of the attack they did not know how long it would have lasted and still did not send anyone.  Do you understand that? 

who knows more Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates or the getbig Secretary of Dumbfense    the stupid party



Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates forcefully defended the Obama administration on Sunday against charges that it did not do enough to prevent the tragedy in Benghazi, telling CBS' "Face the Nation" that some critics of the administration have a "cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces."

Gates, a Republican who was appointed by then-President George W. Bush in 2006 and agreed to stay through more than two years of President Obama's first term, repeatedly declined to criticize the policymakers who devised a response to the September 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

"Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were," said Gates, now the chancellor of the College of William and Mary.

"We don't have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible." he explained.

Suggestions that we could have flown a fighter jet over the attackers to "scare them with the noise or something," Gates said, ignored the "number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from [former Libyan leader] Qaddafi's arsenals."

"I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances," he said.

Another suggestion posed by some critics of the administration, to, as Gates said, "send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous."

"It's sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces," he said. "The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm's way, and there just wasn't time to do that."

[blacken700]

Hey moron - get this through your thick head - at the time of the attack they did not know how long it would have lasted and still did not send anyone.  Do you understand that? 

facts don't get in the way of the stupid party 
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates forcefully defended the Obama administration on Sunday against charges that it did not do enough to prevent the tragedy in Benghazi, telling CBS' "Face the Nation" that some critics of the administration have a "cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces."

Gates, a Republican who was appointed by then-President George W. Bush in 2006 and agreed to stay through more than two years of President Obama's first term, repeatedly declined to criticize the policymakers who devised a response to the September 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

"Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were," said Gates, now the chancellor of the College of William and Mary.

"We don't have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible." he explained.

Suggestions that we could have flown a fighter jet over the attackers to "scare them with the noise or something," Gates said, ignored the "number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from [former Libyan leader] Qaddafi's arsenals."

"I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances," he said.

Another suggestion posed by some critics of the administration, to, as Gates said, "send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous."

"It's sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces," he said. "The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm's way, and there just wasn't time to do that."

[Coach is Back!]

Seems like Benghazi is the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the Obama presidency. 

Except no one died with Clinton. Well, at least not in the Lewinski scandal.

[Archer77]

Except no one died with Clinton. Well, at least not in the Lewinski scandal.

Every sperm is sacred!   

[headhuntersix]

They have said a million times that there were atleast 3 units able to respond...that doesn't include air. And yes.....doing a show of force with aircraft would have been possible. They were worried about AA....really!!! Are we so risk averse that we can't help out an embassy...really!

[Soul Crusher]

They have said a million times that there were atleast 3 units able to respond...that doesn't include air. And yes.....doing a show of force with aircraft would have been possible. They were worried about AA....really!!! Are we so risk averse that we can't help out an embassy...really!

And it was not just 5 - 10 people it was 40 people left to die

[headhuntersix]

Look........with the mistakes in Iraq, Afghanistan and everywhere else....Gates is no expert. I liked him but the Pentagon is fucked up. These guys make mistakes. After the last 13 years, I'll no longer look at General Officers as anything other then dudes who kissed ass and endured the bullshit longer then most.

[blacken700]

i heard next time there is a national crises,they're going to come to getbig for answers  it's a rumor they know everything 

[Soul Crusher]

i heard next time there is a national crises,they're going to come to getbig for answers  it's a rumor they know everything 

We are better than Obama here.

[Soul Crusher]

Goldberg: Benghazi's smoking guns

There's an arsenal worth, from testimony at congressional hearings to the State Department's flawed internal review to the four dead Americans.

President Obama dismissed the reignited controversy over the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, as a "sideshow" on Monday.

By Jonah Goldberg
May 14, 2013



President Obama was asked about the metastasizing Benghazi scandal in a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday. Referring to the Americans who died in Benghazi, the president said, "We dishonor them when we turn things like this into a political circus." He added that "the whole issue of talking points, throughout this process, frankly, has been a sideshow.… There's no there there."


He's half right. The talking points drafted by the State Department, the CIA and the White House and given to congressional Republicans and, most famously, to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice are not the center of this story.
 
I think there was a lot of mischief behind those talking points, which we now know were sanitized, folded, spindled and mutilated to fit a political agenda.


But it's worth remembering that Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't get their information from the talking points. They got their information earlier and from much higher authorities, like then-CIA Director David H. Petraeus. The CIA believed the attacks were terrorist-driven early on. According to ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl, when Petraeus saw the talking points, he thought they were useless.
 
More central are the talking points — written or unwritten — that Obama and Clinton used for weeks after the attacks. The president said Monday that he immediately referred to the Benghazi attacks as "terrorism." This is at best a brutal bending of the truth. He used the word "terror" generically in the Rose Garden on Sept. 12. And then for the next two weeks, he went on a media blitz blaming a video, including in an interview recorded that day with "60 Minutes." In a segment that "60 Minutes" helpfully sat on for almost two months, Obama told Steve Kroft that "it's too early to know" whether the attack was terrorism. He then went on "The View," Univision and David Letterman pushing the idea that it was all about a video. At the United Nations, he condemned a "crude and disgusting" video but didn't mention terrorism.
 
Clinton followed suit. She told grieving family members of the fallen that the U.S. would track down the makers of the video. And, so far, the only person connected with the whole incident who has been punished is the filmmaker, who continues to languish in jail, admittedly on unrelated charges.
 
If you assume they knew the truth about the nature of the attack, how are those statements not proof of a coverup? The talking points are incidental.
 
But in a very serious way, so is the coverup.
 
As Washington Examiner columnist Byron York notes, the Republican obsession with the smoking gun stems from the fact that "they are captive to the Washington mind-set that the coverup is always worse than the crime."
 
This Washington cliche isn't an iron law of the universe. The media like it, I think, because the coverup invariably involves them. When the story is about how the media have been misled, the media can always be counted on to perk up, as we saw last Friday when White House spokesman Jay Carney was eaten alive on C-SPAN.
 
But the true core of this story has nothing to do with media vanity or talking points — or a political circus. The real issue is that for reasons yet to be determined — politics? ideology? incompetence? all three? — the administration was unprepared for an attack on Sept. 11, of all dates. When the attack came, they essentially did nothing as our own people were begging for help — other than to tell those begging to help that they must "stand down."
 
Again, there's an arsenal worth of smoking guns, from uncontested sworn testimony at the Benghazi hearings to the State Department's flawed internal review to the four dead Americans, including a U.S. ambassador sent to Benghazi on Clinton's orders. That's the there there — regardless of what happened with the talking points. There is, from what we know so far, at best circumstantial evidence pointing to why they pushed this video story so hard. Though, as Thoreau once said, "some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."
 
jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com