Benghazi, the “difference” that it makes

)As the smoking guns pile up on the Benghazi scandal it is time to recognize the harm it is doing to our republic.

Hillary Clinton on the Hill

In just the past few days two  important new “smoking gun” emails have come to the public’s attention about the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on our Benghazi consulate which killed four American’s including the United State’s Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. One of the emails was released only after the “most transparent administration in history” was ordered to do so by a federal court as the result of a Freedom of Information request by the watchdog organization Judicial Watch.

The fact that it took a “watchdog” organization to unearth an email which appears to directly tie the White House to the infamous talking points of former UN Ambassador Susan Rice is in itself disturbing.  It clearly demonstrates that the institution, meaning a “free” press, which the framers of our constitution intended to be a watchdog of government’s inevitable abuse of power failed at that task.

It is particularly telling in this case since the email itself is no more than “how to” guide on  “spinning” the narrative of the events surrounding the attacks to that very same media, a task which was evidently successful. The media could not even be bothered to “dig” into the events enough to find the memo which explained how they, the media,  could be spun. It is not as if such tactics are not standard fare of any administration, all administrations attempt to shine the best light on themselves and everybody knows it. The problem is when the media as an institution willingly even  actively joins an administration in this political game.

The fact that this particular email came from Ben Rhodes is even more disturbing since Ben Rhodes is the brother of  David Rhodes who is the President of CBS News the same CBS News which was once instrumental in uncovering the Watergate, Iran-contra  and other Washington political scandals but seems to be less than enthused in perusing this particular “cover-up.” Recently CBS’s best investigative journalist Sharyl Atkisson resigned  and revealed that CBS made no FOIA requests to obtain emails such as the one the network’s president’s brother sent out to “spin” CBS and other news organizations.

Which brings us to the exposure of the most recent “smoking gun” email. On her website, Atkisson informs us of another email which until recently has been not made public at the State Department’s request. The email  from Assistant Secretary of State Beth Jones sent on September 12, 2012  to multiple high ranking State Department officials and as Atkisson points out totally contradicts nearly everything the administration was saying about the video being the cause of the attacks.

The private, internal communication directly contradicts the message that President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and White House press secretary Jay Carney repeated publicly over the course of the next several weeks.They often maintained that an anti-Islamic YouTube video inspired a spontaneous demonstration that escalated into violence.

The email is entitled “Libya update from Beth Jones. ” Jones was then-Assistant Secretary of State to Hillary Clinton. According to the email, Jones spoke to Libya’s Ambassador at 9:45am on Sept. 12, 2012 following the attacks.

“When [the Libyan Ambassador] said his government suspected that former Qaddafi regime elements carried out the attacks, I told him the group that conducted the attacks—Ansar Al Sharia—is affiliated with Islamic extremists,” Jones reports in the email.

There is no uncertainty assigned to the assessment, which does not mention a video or a protest. The State Department provided the email to Congress in Aug. of 2013 under special conditions that it not be publicly released at that time. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) sought and received permission to release it Thursday.

With the publication of these two emails we now have documentation that:

• On September 14, 2012 The White House attempted to deflect blame away from their policies and to the You Tube video as the Ben Rhodes email makes clear when he writes under “goals” for Susan Rice’s appearances

“To underscore that these protests are rooted in an internet video, and not a broader failure of policy;”

• On September 12, 2012 The State Department knew that the attacks in Benghazi were from a known terrorist organization and not the result of the “internet video.”

“I told him the group that conducted the attacks—Ansar Al Sharia—is affiliated with Islamic extremists,”

All of these high-ranking administration officials were “in the loop” on how the Obama Administration was going to respond to the events of September 11, 2012, yet they continued for weeks afterwards to portray the events in Benghazi as being the result of the video.

Which brings us to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s famous response to Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) question on why the American public was not informed that this was a terrorist attack and not a demonstration “gone awry.”

 Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?

The difference that it makes is huge and it is very simply this.  A fundamental bedrock of American democracy is that the powers of government should not be used as a means to attain or retain power. As naïve as this may sound knowing that all administration do use the power of government for this purpose, our very existence as a free nation depends on the concept that it is not acceptable for politicians to abuse the levers of government in order to retain their positions.  As fundamental as this concept is, the nation has grown cynical and ignores its importance at its peril.

In the same way that homicides occur multiple times a day in our nation there occurrences does not make the act acceptable.  Using the same institutions of government that are in place to protect and serve the American people in order to mislead them is murder of the public’s trust. One of our foundation beliefs as a nation is that government’s very existence is by “the consent of the governed” and if that consent is bought through the  deceptive use of our public servants of our government institutions then there is no real consent at all, there is only tyranny.  It is not necessary, at least initially, for despotic governments to rule by force if they can rule through deception.

This administration’s first big failure in the Benghazi scandal was that they did not attempt to rescue our fellow citizens.  An attempt which if unsuccessful or even futile still defines who we are as a nation.  As General Lovell testified “the point is we should have tried.”  How can the world look at us as anything other than weak when with the most powerful military force in the history of humanity we sit by and watch our diplomats slaughtered without an effort at rescue and thus far any retribution.

From a domestic political point of view it is even worse. The institutions which have been established to protect and serve us are now being used to deceive and manipulate us with no oversight from the media and in some cases with active support from that media.  At this point in our history, this makes a very big difference Madam Secretary, a very big difference indeed.

As Seen On Twitter

So the CIA is giving agents lie detector tests to make sure agents aren't telling the truth. MIND=BLOWN
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) August 2, 2013

BLAME THE PRESIDENT FOR BENGHAZI

Via-Big Peace

When the American mission in Benghazi, Libya was attacked on September 11th, 2012, only one person had the positional authority, legal mandate, and communications apparatus to give the order to defend our personnel on the ground: the President of the United States.

The President did not give that order, and four Americans died in Benghazi that day. All the rest of the nonsense we have been treated to, from prepared talking points, congressional hearings, and finally to the outright lies matter not when compared to the ignominious moments in which the President of the United States refused to do his job.

That same day, two other American embassies in the Middle East were also under attack in Sana, Yemen and Cairo, Egypt. As a result, our intelligence systems were on high alert. When the calls, satellite and drone feeds, faxes, and reports began bombarding every command center from Germany to the United States, our nation, already at war for eleven years, was again under siege. Staffs from Africa Command, European Command, the National Military Command Center, the CIA Operations Center, the State Department Operations Center, and the White House Situation Room were fully operational.

This all means that on September 11, 2012, our national security apparatus was on full alert. It means everyone was briefed. This is how it works; no games, no conjecture, no television and movie looks, just real battle in real time with real lives at risk.

The road to that indecision is littered with policy and leadership failures that culminated in an American mission and clandestine CIA base being attacked and the murder of our Ambassador and three dedicated Americans doing their jobs. However, the one person responsible for it all is the one man who could have, but refused to, even try to stop the carnage... the President of the United States.

All the President had to say within the first two hours while being briefed by the Secretary of Defense was, “Send in a response force.” This command, followed by his signature on a paper called Cross Border Authority, would have ordered the Department of Defense to do everything and anything to save lives in Benghazi, Libya.

Three and a half years earlier, on April 9, 2009, President Obama had done exactly that when pirates hijacked an American flagged merchant ship, Maersk Alabama, sailing off the coast of Somalia. In this earlier incident, the President made the right decision within hours to allow SEAL Team Six the time to plan and go. In the end, we all witnessed a textbook successful rescue operation.

Fast forward to September 11, 2012, and we have a desperate situation with Americans in jeopardy. The same President who instead of deciding how to respond disappeared for the evening then went to Las Vegas the following day to raise money for his re-election campaign.

Had the President ordered a rescue, he had everything he needed to mount a prompt and forceful response--from F-16’s in Aviano, Italy, to an armed and fueled plane standing by at C Company, 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group, training in Croatia; a mere three hours from Benghazi by air.

When the first shot was fired in Benghazi, no one knew how long the fight would last. Subsequent government claims saying we could not get there within the seven-plus hours that the tragedy lasted are specious at best and an outright lie at worst. We did not even care enough to try; that fact alone should make all Americans who mourn the loss of four of our countrymen very angry.

This ultimate Presidential control—the ability to bring armed American forces to bear anywhere in the world within hours—has existed for over 25 years. It exists precisely because of past mistakes and embarrassing moments brought to us by various governmental agencies, congresses, and presidents.

Since September 11th, 2012, we have been treated to a tractor-trailer load of misdirection, disingenuous speeches, television appearances, and outright lying by public officials at every level of the government of the United States of America. Now with other scandals hitting the news, we are beginning to forget and confuse what is the only important point to know after we acknowledge and pray for the four Americans murdered by terrorists that fateful day.

There is one simple point to be made about Benghazi: the President of the United States is the only human being on the planet that can order a bullet, a missile, a plane, a drone, a boat, a helicopter, a soldier, sailor, spy, or push cart with a squirt gun attached to go into another country and perform an aggressive action.

On September 11, 2012, we know the President failed to give that order. We don’t know where he was, what he was doing, or why he failed to act. But we do know he failed to act, and that inaction cost the lives of four brave Americans.

Lies About Libya

Via-The American Spectator

by Thomas Sowell

There can be honest differences of opinion on many subjects. But there can also be dishonest differences. Last week’s testimony under oath about events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 makes painfully clear that what the Obama administration told the American people about those events were lies out of whole cloth.

What we were told repeatedly last year by the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and the American ambassador to the U.N., was that there was a protest demonstration in Benghazi against an anti-Islamic video produced by an American, and that this protest demonstration simply escalated out of control.

This “spontaneous protest” story did not originate in Libya but in Washington. Neither the Americans on duty in Libya during the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, nor officials of the Libyan government, said anything about a protest demonstration.

The highest American diplomat on the scene in Libya spoke directly with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by phone, and told her that it was a terrorist attack. The president of Libya announced that it was a terrorist attack. The C.I.A. told the Obama administration that it was a terrorist attack.

With lies, as with potato chips, it is hard to stop with just one. After the “spontaneous protest” story was discredited, the next claim was that this was the best information available at the time from intelligence sources.

But that claim cannot survive scrutiny, now that the 12 drafts of the Obama administration’s talking points about Benghazi have belatedly come to light. As draft after draft of the talking points were made, e-mails from the State Department pressured the intelligence services to omit from these drafts their clear and unequivocal statement from the outset that this was a terrorist attack.

Attempts to make it seem that Ambassador Susan Rice’s false story about a “spontaneous protest” was the result of her not having accurate information from the intelligence services have now been exposed as a second lie to excuse the first lie.

Despite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s loudly proclaimed question “What difference, at this point, does it make?” the difference is between an honest mistake and a calculated lie to deceive the American people, in order to win an election.

Barack Obama’s election campaign oratory had proclaimed the death of Osama bin Laden as an accomplishment of his administration, as part of a general defeat of Al-Qaeda and other terrorists. To admit that these terrorists were still in action, and strong enough to kill an American ambassador and three other Americans in a well-coordinated military style attack, would be a politically devastating admission during the election campaign.

Far better, politically, to come up with a story about a protest demonstration that just got out of hand. This could be presented as an isolated, one-time event, rather than part of a continuing pattern of terrorism by groups that were still active, despite President Obama’s spin suggesting that they were not.

The problem with telling a lie, or even a succession of lies, is that a very small dose of the truth can sometimes make the whole thing collapse like a house of cards. The State Department’s own foreign service officer Gregory Hicks was in Libya during the attack, so he knew the truth. When threats were not enough to silence him, it was then necessary to try to discredit him.

After years of getting glowing job evaluations, and awards of honors from the State Department for his work in various parts of the world, Mr. Hicks suddenly began to get bad job evaluations and was demoted to a desk job in Washington after he spoke with a Congressman about what he knew. The truth is dangerous to liars.

The Obama administration’s excuse for not trying to get help to the Americans in Benghazi while they were under attack — namely, that it would take too long — is as shaky as its other statements. A small fighting unit in Tripoli was ready to get on a plane to Benghazi when they were ordered to “stand down.” Other fighting units located outside of Libya are designed precisely for fast deployment — and nobody knew how many hours the attack would last.

But it will take more investigations to determine who gave the order to “stand down,” and why. How many new lies that will generate is another question.

What Did Obama Know and When Did He Know It?

Via-Front Page Magazine


By Matthew Vadum

Congressional testimony this week showed the appalling lengths to which the Obama administration went to cover-up its mishandling of last fall’s terrorist attack at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, but President Obama’s precise role in the cynical operation remains hidden.

Americans still don’t know what President Obama knew and when he knew it. We don’t know what exactly he did when he learned on Sept. 11, 2012 that U.S. officials in Benghazi were under attack. Obama may have gone to bed while the attack was in progress, leaving others in the administration to develop a politically expedient cover story calculated to get the Obama administration past the finish line last Election Day.

Obama’s advisers, with the president’s consent or not, opted to tell lies to get their man reelected, and to deal with the consequences of those untruths later. They knew they could count on the mainstream media to snooze on the job and dismiss the investigation to come as a partisan witch-hunt.

The manufactured storyline emphasized Obama’s increasingly hollow claim that “al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat and Osama bin Laden is dead.” It allowed the president to escape much need scrutiny about his lame approach to national security and the threat that Islamism poses to the United States.

Although three State Department whistleblowers testified Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the testimony of one witness in particular was especially unfavorable to the Obama administration.

During the hearing, star witness Gregory N. Hicks, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya during the attacks, explained to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) that U.S. military personnel were not allowed to come to the aid of U.S. officials in Benghazi, a mere 400 nautical miles away.

“They remained in Tripoli with us,” Hicks said. “The medic went with the nurse to the hospital and his skills to the treatment of and care of our wounded.”

Chaffetz asked how the personnel reacted to being ordered to stand down.

“They were furious,” Hicks answered. “I can only say, well, I will quote [Army] Lieutenant Colonel [Steve] Gibson — he said ‘this is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.’”

Hicks testified that in his opinion U.S. military forces could have responded in time to the attacks in Benghazi had they been permitted to do so.

The U.S. defense attaché indicated around 10:45 p.m. on the night of the extended firefight between doomed consular officials and Islamic terrorists that U.S. soldiers could have been on site in Benghazi within a maximum of three hours, Hicks said.

The attaché said that U.S. African Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff made it known that they had military assets in the area capable of responding, Hicks said.

Former U.S. Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods lost their lives at about 2 a.m. when the consulate was subjected to mortar fire.

Because Hicks’s assertion that there was a stand-down order contradicted Senate Armed Services Committee testimony Feb. 7 by U.S. Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) publicly demanded yesterday that the nation’s top uniformed military commander come back to Capitol Hill to offer new testimony about the Benghazi saga.

“I asked [Dempsey] directly,” Graham told Fox News.

“Were there any military assets in motion, to help folks in Benghazi, [that were] told to stand down? And what did Greg Hicks say? That Lieutenant Colonel Gibson — a DOD employee, a member of the Army — was in Tripoli, ready and willing to go to Benghazi, preparing to go to Benghazi, and was told to stand down.”

“Clearly,” Graham said, “our chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ rendition that no one was told to stand down is now in question.”

Fox News asked Pentagon spokesman Major Rob Firman to comment. “They weren’t told to stand down. They were simply told not to go to Benghazi. They were told to go to the airport in Tripoli to provide security there,” he said.

Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Seiber, a spokesman for the Joint Staff, said in a separate interview that if Dempsey were to testify again, his remarks “will not change.”

Graham also said he wanted Cheryl Mills, who was then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s legal counsel and chief of staff, to testify about Benghazi, and wanted Clinton recalled as a witness for further testimony. (Joel Pollak helpfully notes that while Clinton may have misled Congress in her previous testimony, she did not do so under oath.)

At the Wednesday hearing Hicks also testified that he never believed the attacks were prompted by a hilariously low-quality anti-Islam video on YouTube. It remains unclear who authored the now-infamous talking point but some evidence points in the direction of Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes.

Hicks said no one from the consulate reported that the assault on the consulate was related to protests over an anti-Islam video, the Obama administration’s invented explanation for what led to the attack.

Hicks said he spoke to U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens by telephone not long after the mission was besieged. Stevens’s last words to him were, “Greg, we’re under attacks,” Hicks testified.

When Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice helped spread the phony cover story on Sunday TV talks shows five days later, saying that the video sparked the assault, Hicks testified that he was “stunned. My jaw dropped. And I was embarrassed.”

Hicks said he had asked Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones why Rice had blamed the attacks on the video. “She said, ‘I don’t know,’” Hicks said in his testimony.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked, “But was it like you shouldn’t be asking that question, you should be quiet, we don’t want to talk about that? Was that the sense you got?”

“The sense I got was I needed to stop the line of questioning,” Hicks responded.

Hicks recounted that Clinton’s then-chief of staff chewed him out over an unauthorized meeting he had with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

Hicks gave Chaffetz a classified briefing without a lawyer from the State Department being present, contrary to Clinton’s orders. Mills, whom evidence established told witnesses not to cooperate with congressional investigators, was “upset,” Hicks said.

An emotional Hicks expressed dissatisfaction with the Obama administration’s approach to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2012, and what followed them.

“I am a career public servant,” Hicks said. “Until the aftermath of Benghazi I loved every day of my job.”

At this point it appears that only partisan leftists, useful idiots, the naive, and the ill-informed profess the belief that run-of-the-mill governmental incompetence explains the administration’s disgraceful behavior on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center.

Chances are Republicans in Congress will not drop this critical issue and that this week’s testimony from State Department officials who were bullied and intimidated by the Obama White House is only the beginning.

Obama's Benghazi cover-up begins unraveling today

Via-Washington Examiner Editorial


Ever since Sept. 11, 2012, when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in a terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the Obama administration has done its best to confuse and conceal what actually happened. On Wednesday, when three career State Department officials testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Americans may finally start to get the real story.

In the aftermath of the attack, the Obama administration tried to focus attention on a silly YouTube amateur video mocking Muhammad, which President Obama repeatedly mentioned during a speech to the United Nations. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice went even further, telling ABC News, "Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous -- not a premeditated -- response to what had transpired in Cairo." She continued, "In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated."

Subsequently, the administration grudgingly admitted that it was a premeditated terrorist attack rather than a spontaneous demonstration protesting an obscure video. Reporting by The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes earlier this week made clear that multiple senior White House and State Department officials knew the video explanation was a fabrication.

Gregory Hicks, one of the witnesses scheduled to testify tomorrow, is expected to drive home the point. Hicks, a 22-year Foreign Service veteran who was the deputy chief-of-mission at the U.S. Embassy, didn't mince words when interviewed by House investigators, according to a transcript obtained by CBS News. "I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning," he said.

According to CBS, Hicks also told investigators that "a team of Special Forces prepared to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks was forbidden from doing so by U.S. Special Operations Command Africa.SDRq This, CBS noted, was "in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized." The committee will also hear testimony from Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism at the State Department, and Eric Nordstom, a diplomatic security officer and former regional security officer in Libya for the Department of State.

The hearing comes on the heels of a report by House Republicans last month that contained evidence that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have misrepresented events and her role in them while testifying under oath to Congress concerning requests for additional security in Benghazi. "I didn't see those requests. They didn't come to me. I didn't approve them. I didn't deny them," Clinton told Congress. But according to the congressional report, "On April 19, 2012, the response cable from the Department of State to Embassy Tripoli, bearing Secretary Clinton's signature, acknowledges Ambassador (Gene) Cretz's request for additional security but instead articulates a plan to scale back security assets for the U.S. Mission in Libya, including the Benghazi Mission."

Americans have endured eight months of purposeful opacity from Obama administration officials on Benghazi. Tomorrow's hearing will likely bring some credible answers.

Toon

JOHN MCCAIN SNAPS AT DAVID GREGORY

Via-The Blaze

Just A Thought

With the recent revelations by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that he had no communications with President Obama after the initial pre-scheduled meeting ninety minutes after they learned the American consulate in Benghazi was under attack, a very important question is not being asked. According to Panetta, Obama told him to do whatever was necessary to protect American lives. This is all well and good, Panetta would be the man to take charge of a response, but the question is this:


Did Obama authorize Panetta to send United States aircraft into Libya airspace without Libya's permission?

Putting aside the obvious lack of concern that Obama showed by not keeping up with the situation, the fact of the matter is that only the President of the United States can authorize the violation of another nation's sovereign territory. If he did not give Panetta that authority then for all practical purposes, Panetta really could do nothing. I would also suggest that such an order would have to be in writing, a verbal command would not suffice.

The fact that the only rescue mission that eventually did go to Benghazi was sent from Tripoli tends to lead one to believe that Obama did not give such an order and in fact one must wonder if he did not specifically deny such a request since everyone involved would know that his authorization would be required and certainly they would have asked for it.


Why the Senators during the hearing did not press him (Panetta) on this is curious. Perhaps they did not have time to think through the implications of what Panetta revealed, but nobody seems to be asking the right questions that would get to the bottom of this. So we probably never will.

Toon

Just a Reminder

Via-Freedom's Lighthouse

"Juvenile"

Oh, We Forgot to Tell You ...

Via-Town Hall

Victor Davis Hanson

The second-term curse goes like this: A president (e.g., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, etc.) wins re-election, but then his presidency implodes over the next four years -- mired in scandals or disasters such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the Iraqi insurgency and Hurricane Katrina.

Apparently, like tragic Greek heroes, administrations grow arrogant after their re-election wins. They believe that they are invincible and that heir public approval is permanent rather than fickle.

The result is that Nemesis zeroes in on their fatal conceit and with a boom corrects their hubris. Or is the problem in some instances simply that embarrassments and scandals, hushed up in fear that they might cost an administration an election, explode with a fury in the second term?

Toon

Via Legal Insurrection

Petraeus and Benghazi: A Time for Truth

Via-RCP

By Pat Buchanan


The stunning resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus, days before he was to testify on the CIA role in the Benghazi massacre, raises many more questions than his resignation letter answers.

"I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair," wrote Petraeus. "Such behavior is unacceptable ... as the leader of an organization such as ours."

The problem: Petraeus' "unacceptable behavior," adultery with a married mother of two, Paula Broadwell, that exposed the famous general to blackmail, began soon after he became director in 2011.

Was his security detail at the CIA and were his closest associates oblivious to the fact that the director was a ripe target for blackmail, since any revelation of the affair could destroy his career?

Loose lips and all that...

DID PETRAEUS MISTRESS REVEAL SECRET CIA PRISON?

Notable Quotes

"[T]he conclusion to be drawn is quite simple: CBS News, in an effort to assist President Obama’s re-election campaign, corruptly concealed information about two critical issues–namely, a terror attack and the president’s dishonesty about it. When the players in the Libya scandal face investigation, so, too, should CBS News and those in the mainstream media who have wantonly assisted the administration’s shameless lies."

Scott Johnson

Toon

Via-Legal Insurrection

Two for the road

Via-Washington Examiner

Noemie Emery

If President Obama loses next Tuesday, we will be tempted to point to two days that did it: Sept. 11, 2012, (riots in Cairo and elsewhere); and Oct. 3, (the first debate). But the real cause may lie in two paths not taken, in which unwise decisions led to bad outcomes.

The Wages of Libya

Via-The Corner

By Victor Davis Hanson

We have had ambassadors murdered abroad before, but we have never seen anything quite like the tragic fate of Chris Stevens. Amid all the controversy over Libya, we have lost sight of the human — and often horrific — story of Benghazi: a U.S. ambassador attacked, cut off and killed alone, after being abused by frenzied terrorists, and a second member of the embassy staff murdered, as two American private citizens rushed to the rescue, heroically warding off Islamist hit teams, until they were overwhelmed and also killed.

Seven weeks after the tragedy in Benghazi, new government narratives just keep appearing, as various branches of government point the finger at one another. Now the president insists that “the minute” he “found out what was going on” he gave “very clear directives” to “make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to.” The secretary of defense argues that he knew too little to send in military forces to save the post. Meanwhile, we are hearing from other sources that the beleaguered compound in extremis was denied help on three separate occasions, and there are still more contradictory accounts.

When the government systematically misleads and cannot establish a believable narrative, almost everyone involved is eventually tarred. The final chart of those officials in the Nixon White House who were devoured by Watergate was vast — and so it is becoming with the disaster in Libya. If we have learned anything from Watergate and Iran-Contra, it is that the longer officials deceive and obfuscate, the greater the number of wrecked careers and reputations.