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Official: We knew Benghazi was a terrorist attack “from the get-go”

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From CBS News. This is a news article, not an editorial.

Excerpt:

 “Everybody in the mission” in Benghazi, Libya, thought the attack on a U.S. consulate there last Sept. 11 was an act of terror “from the get-go,” according to excerpts of an interview investigators conducted with the No. 2 official in Libya at the time, obtained by CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

“I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning,” Greg Hicks, a 22-year foreign service diplomat who was the highest-ranking U.S. official in Libya after the strike, told investigators under authority of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Hicks, the former U.S. Embassy Tripoli deputy chief of mission, was not in Benghazi at the time of the attack, which killed Chris Stevens – then the U.S. ambassador to Libya – and three other Americans.

When he appears this week before the committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., Hicks is expected to offer testimony at odds with what some American officials were saying in public – and on “Face the Nation” – just five days after the attack. Benghazi whistleblowers have rallied attention to discrepancies among the administration’s reaction to the attack, which The Weekly Standard suggests was frayed by ever-evolving talking points that sought to remove references to al Qaeda.

On Sept. 16, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice hit the media circuit, appearing on all five Sunday talk shows to dispel the notion that the strike was a premeditated terrorist act and to perpetuate the case that it began “spontaneously” out of protests in Egypt. Rice’s spot on “Face the Nation” that day was preceded by the new President of Libya Mohammed al-Magariaf, who said his government had “no doubt that this was preplanned, predetermined.”

[…]Appearing on “Face the Nation” to address Hicks’s remarks, chairman Issa agreed Sunday that the “fatal error” in a debacle that marked a “misinformation campaign at best, and a cover-up at worst,” was tossing into the lurch the relationship between the United States and Libya.

Read the whole article for a lot more about this critical scandal.

The attack was pre-planned. American personnel on the ground in Libya knew it was a pre-planned attack. The talking points that were put out were false. The purpose of the talking points was to save Obama’s re-election campaign by hiding the fact that his weakness emboldened our enemies to commit more terrorist attacks than happened under Bush. Frank Gaffney even suggests that the cover-up was meant to hide the Obama administration’s efforts to supply Syrian opposition forces, including Al Qaeda, with heavy weapons. A sort of “Fast and Furious ” gun-walking program for Jihadis, instead of Mexican drug cartels.

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Benghazi whistle-blower: assets to protect the embassy were available

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Here’s a report from one of the whistle-blowers who is shedding light on the Benghazi cover-up.

Excerpt:

A military special ops member who watched as the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi unfolded last September told Fox News the U.S. had highly trained forces just a few hours away, and said he and others feel the government betrayed the four men who died in the attack.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, and appearing in a Fox News Channel interview with his face and voice disguised, the special operator contradicted claims by the Obama administration and a State Department review that said there wasn’t enough time for U.S. military forces to have intervened in the Sept. 11 attack in which U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, an embassy employee and two former Navy SEALs working as private security contractors were killed.

“I know for a fact that C-110, the EUCOM CIF, was doing a training exercise in … not in the region of North Africa, but in Europe,” the operator told Fox News’ Adam Housley. “And they had the ability to act and to respond.”

The C-110 is a 40-man Special Ops force capable of rapid response and deployment specifically trained for incidents like last year’s attack in Benghazi. During the night of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Libya, in which U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in Libya, the C-110 were training in Croatia, just 3 ½ hours away.

“We had the ability to load out, get on birds and fly there, at a minimum stage,” the operator told Fox News. “C-110 had the ability to be there, in my opinion, in a matter of about four hours…four to six hours.”

Being so close, C-110s would have been able to respond had there been a second attack, the source added.

Will this testimony come to light at a hearing, or will it be covered up by the Obama administration?

Fox News reports that the Obama administration is threatening whistle-blowers.

Excerpt:

At least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistle-blowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.

“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”

Toensing declined to name her client. She also refused to say whether the individual was on the ground in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, when terrorist attacks on two U.S. installations in the Libyan city killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the attacks: the months that led up to the attack, when pleas by the ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time frame in which the attacks unfolded, and the eight-day period that followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials incorrectly described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.

“It’s frightening, and they’re doing some very despicable threats to people,” she said. “Not ‘we’re going to kill you,’ or not ‘we’re going to prosecute you tomorrow,’ but they’re taking career people and making them well aware that their careers will be over [if they cooperate with congressional investigators].”

In general, Democrats are not strong on foreign policy, because they blame America for everything and praise our enemies when they attack us. You won’t get much security from that attitude. When things go wrong, they will try to cover it up. They will even resort to outright lies in order to avoid the blame they deserve for opening us up to terrorist attacks.

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Five terrorist attacks succeeded under Obama, but none succeeded under Bush after 9/11

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The Weekly Standard reports.

Excerpt:

Congressman Tom Cotton took to the House floor “to express grave doubts about the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism policies and programs”.

“I rise today to express grave doubts about the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism policies and programs,” said the freshman congressman from Arkansas. “Counterterrorism is often shrouded in secrecy, as it should be, so let us judge by the results. In barely four years in office, five jihadists have reached their targets in the United States under Barack Obama: the Boston Marathon bomber, the underwear bomber, the Times Square Bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, and in my own state—the Little Rock recruiting office shooter. In the over seven years after 9/11 under George W. Bush, how many terrorists reached their target in the United States? Zero! We need to ask, ‘Why is the Obama Administration failing in its mission to stop terrorism before it reaches its targets in the United States?’

FIVE terrorist attacks linked to Islamic fundamentalism under Obama, but ZERO such attacks once Bush got serious after the 9/11 attack.

This accusation comes on the heels of a new Congressional report that shows that the Obama administration did indeed lie to cover up their failures on the Benghazi debacle.

The Washington Times summarized what’s in the report:

The report says the State Department quickly notified the White House that the attack was taking place in Benghazi, and that within two hours of the start of the attack the department was telling the White House that al Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia was claiming responsibility for it.

“In an ‘Ops Alert’ issued shortly after the attack began, the State Department Operations Center notified senior Department officials, the White House Situation Room, and others, that the Benghazi compound was under attack and that ‘approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well,’” said the report.

“Two hours later, the Operations Center issued an alert that al-Qa’ida linked Ansar al-Sharia (AAS) claimed responsibility for the attack and had called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli,” said the report. “Neither alert mentioned that there had been a protest at the location of the attacks. Further, Administration documents provided to the Committees show that there was ample evidence that the attack was planned and intentional. The coordinated, complex, and deadly attack on the [CIA’s] Annex [down the road from the State Department mission]–that included sophisticated weapons–is perhaps the strongest evidence that the attacks were not spontaneous. “

“The U.S. government knew immediately that the attacks constituted an act of terror,” says the report.

The report says that the Obama administration purged references to al Qaeda from the talking points that U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice used when she appeared on Sept. 16 on five Sunday talks shows to discuss the Benghazi attacks.

“After the attacks, the Administration perpetuated a deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative that the violence grew out of a demonstration caused by a YouTube video,” says the report. “The Administration consciously decided not to discuss extremist involvement or previous attacks against Western interests in Benghazi.”

“To protect the State Department, the Administration deliberately removed references to al Qaeda-linked groups and previous attacks in Benghazi in the talking points used by Ambassador Rice, thereby perpetuating the deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative that the attacks evolved from a demonstration caused by a YouTube video,” says the report.

The reports criticizes the administration for responding to the attack as a criminal event requiring an FBI investigation rather than as an act of terrorism against the United States requiring a military response.

Investors Business Daily is flat out saying that Hillary Clinton lied to cover up the Benghazi attack. (H/T Doug Ross)

The Obama administration ignored warnings from Russia

A third point to consider is this article from the Boston Globe. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Russian authorities contacted the US government with concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev not once but “multiple’’ times, including an alert it sent after he was first investigated by FBI agents in Boston, raising new questions about whether the FBI should have paid more attention to the suspected Boston Marathon bomber, US senators briefed on the inves­tigation said Tuesday.

The FBI has previously said it interviewed Tsarnaev in early 2011 after it was initially contacted by the ­Russians. In their review, completed in summer 2011, the bureau found no ­evidence that Tsarnaev was a threat. “The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from” Russia, the agency said last week.

Following a closed briefing of the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday, Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, said he believed that Russia alerted the United States about Tsarnaev in “multiple contacts,” including at least once since October 2011.

So, in view of these three points, why do you think it is that the Obama administration cannot keep us safe from attacks in the way that Bush could? Well, the first reason is that Bush was willing to go to war with states that harbored terrorists in order to deter future attacks. Obama pulls out of the places that are known to train and harbor terrorists. Terrorists interpret Obama’s retreats as weakness, and that’s why terrorist-sponsoring states feel confident about not cracking down within their own borders. Terrorists feared that Bush would do nasty things to them – like sanction strikes by Israel, or invading Syria, or blockading Iran – if they did not crack down on terrorism themselves and give up their WMDs (as Libya did).

The second reason is because Democrats can’t believe in their heart of hearts that evil could be caused by anyone other than America and conservative Americans. I’ve written before about how the Obama administration considers their political enemies to be the real terrorists. People who are pro-life, or want smaller government. That’s who this administration is focused on. So, we should not be surprised that the real terrorists are slipping by. Heck, we are even supplying terrorists with welfare to fund their attacks on us. Why shouldn’t we expect attacks to increase? We elected people who aren’t serious about dealing with our real enemies.