The Obama Administration promised that it would get to the bottom of what happened in the attack on the Benghazi consulate on Sept 11, 2012; that it would bring the perpetrators to justice. Almost a year and a half later, the only times you hear about Benghazi in the media are when new revelations emerge showing what the administration has not told us. We hear nothing from the Administration on progress it has made in its investigation. Below, in bold, are just some of the lies and misinformation the Administration has told about Benghazi.
We released all emails related to Benghazi
Then why are we seeing new emails now?
The attack in Benghazi originated in a spontaneous video protest by a mob outside the Benghazi diplomatic headquarters
As Guy Benson reports and the evidence has confirmed, the 9/11 attacks were not rooted in an “internet video” … the State Department’s second in command on the ground in Libya called it (the video) a “non event” vis-a-vis the Benghazi raid. The US government, including Sec. Clinton and CIA Director Petraeus, knew the attack was a coordinated terrorist action almost immediately.
The State Department also knew that there was NO video protest at the Benghazi consulate.
Obama called this a terror attack in the Rose Garden speech given immediately after the event
In the Rose Garden speech on Sept 12, 2012 President Obama did use the phrase “act of terror,” however in the following days and weeks he and his Administration coordinated their message to keep connecting the attack to the “spontaneous” video, their narrative strongly implying that the video directly caused the attack, when in fact they DID NOT KNOW whether or not the video was in any way connected to the attack. At the time, Obama was saying that an investigation was under way and they didn’t yet know for sure if it’s terrorism. How then would they know the role that the video did or did not play? Why keep advancing and emphasizing the video narrative if the investigation hadn’t yet taken place to provide corroborating evidence that the attack was connected with the video?
Yet everywhere he appeared and spoke about Benghazi Obama did not say that this was a planned terrorist attack, but kept mentioning its connection with the video.
Obama on Letterman, Sept 18:
LETTERMAN: Now, I don’t understand, um, the ambassador to Libya killed in an attack on the consulate in Benghazi. Is this an act of war? Are we at war now? What happens here?
OBAMA: Here’s what happened. … You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who — who made an extremely offensive video directed at — at Mohammed and Islam —
LETTERMAN: Making fun of the Prophet Mohammed.
OBAMA: Making fun of the Prophet Mohammed. And so, this caused great offense in much of the Muslim world. But what also happened, extremists and terrorists used this as an excuse to attack a variety of our embassies, including the one, the consulate in Libya.
Obama on Univision, Sept. 20:
OBAMA: Well, we’re still doing an investigation, and there are going to be different circumstances in different countries. And so I don’t want to speak to something until we have all the information. What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests —
SALINAS: Al-Qaeda?
OBAMA: Well, we don’t know yet. And so we’re going to continue to investigate this. We’ve insisted on and have received so far full cooperation from countries like Egypt and Libya and Tunisia in not only protecting our diplomatic posts, but also to make sure that we discover who, in fact, is trying to take advantage of this.
Tony Bevan writes in his article What the President Said About Benghazi, “Although it’s not clear how strongly he stressed this point within the administration, former CIA Director David Petraeus testified on November 16 that his agency knew early on that an al-Qaeda-affiliated group was behind the attack in Benghazi.”
Obama on The View, Sept 25:
BEHAR: OK, I want to talk about Libya for a second because on 9/11 of this past year our embassy was attacked there and we lost four people, including the ambassador, and it was reported that people just went crazy and wild because of this anti-Muslim movie, or anti-Mohammed, I guess, movie. But then I heard Hillary Clinton say it was an act of terrorism. Is it? What do you say?
OBAMA: Well, we’re still doing an investigation. There’s no doubt the kind of weapons that were used, the ongoing assault, that it wasn’t just a mob action. Now, we don’t have all the information yet, and so we’re still gathering it. But what’s clear is that around the world, there are still a lot of threats out there.
Obama at the UN, Sept 25:
And on this we must agree: There is no speech that justifies mindless violence. There are no words that excuse the killing of innocents. There’s no video that justifies an attack on an embassy. There’s no slander that provides an excuse for people to burn a restaurant in Lebanon, or destroy a school in Tunis, or cause death and destruction in Pakistan.
Read more: Obama Claims He Called Benghazi an Act of Terrorism
The Big Lie: Obama Did Not Call Libya Attacks Terrorism on Sept 12
The U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, on behalf of the Administration, went on five different Sunday nationally televised talk shows to promulgate the narrative about the “spontaneous” nature of the attacks being due to a video. She claimed the attack on the Benghazi consulate evolved from a spontaneous demonstration and was not premeditated.
The quotes above demonstrate that President Obama and his administration most certainly did not categorize Benghazi as terrorism, which by definition is a planned attack, but rather, emphasized the video narrative of a spontaneous protest somehow evolving into a full blown attack. Whatever impact the video had or did not have on those coordinating the attacks on the consulate in Benghazi is still not known. We continue to hear nothing from this Administration regarding the results of their ongoing investigation. What is very clear is that there was NO VIDEO protest at all going on outside the Benghazi consulate; therefore the narrative that a video protest escalated into the full attack on the compound was deliberately misleading. Why would the Administration do this? Political expedience. A spontaneous video protest escalating into a full blown attack plays much better politically than the facts of the real situation in Benghazi: that our government was caught unprepared for this terrorist attack, having ignored repeated warnings about the insecure, volatile, extremely dangerous situation the consulate was under and not providing security adequate to the situation. After the disaster of Benghazi, the Administration went into full clean up mode, not wanting to admit this was a planned terrorist attack that happened on the anniversary of 9/11. With the re-election campaign in full swing it was critical to keep on pretending that “al Qaeda is on the run.”
The more evidence that emerges, the clearer the conclusion seems to be that four Americans died in Benghazi because of the monumental blunders of President Obama and many in his Administration, including then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Our great military resources were not made available while the Benghazi consulate was under siege. Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee heard its first testimony from a member of the military who was at Africa Command during the time of the Benghazi attack on the U.S consulate. Retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Lovell said the military should have and could have done more to help Americans who were killed in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 (see video above).
In the meantime, while the wait for justice stretches on, our most “transparent” Administration continues to not give straight answers; witness Jay Carney’s latest spin where he provides more non-answers to such questions as why we are seeing new emails on Benghazi now when it was previously claimed that all such emails were provided, and why the Benghazi talking points for Susan Rice were actually not altered not just by one phrase as he claimed, but radically redacted.
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