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BBC News covers whistle-blower testimony: “After Benghazi revelations, heads will roll”

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And now the radically secular and leftist BBC News is on board, because of the ABC News story.

Excerpt:

There’s new evidence, obtained by ABC, that the Obama administration did deliberately purge references to “terrorism” from accounts of the attack on the Benghazi diplomatic mission, which killed four people including the US ambassador to Libya.

Conservatives have long maintained that the administration deliberately suppressed the truth about the attacks.

This is the first hard evidence that the state department did ask for changes to the CIA’s original assessment.

Specifically, they wanted references to previous warnings deleted and this sentence removed: “We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.”

There’s little doubt in my mind that this will haunt Hillary Clinton if she decides to run for president, unless she executes some pretty fancy footwork.

State department spokesperson Victoria Nuland is directly implicated, and the fingerprints of senior White House aides Ben Rhodes and Jay Carney are there as well.

And look at this closely:

In the interests of full disclosure I have to say I have not in the past been persuaded that allegations of a cover-up were a big deal. It seemed to me a partisan attack based on very little.

I remember listening to reports from the BBC and others at the time that did suggest the attack in Benghazi was a spontaneous reaction to a rather puerile anti-Islamic video.

I understand President Barack Obama’s careful use of the word “terrorism” when it actually means something, rather than as a knee-jerk description of any violence by foreigners against Americans, often in order to justify a “war on terror”.

But the evidence is there in black and white, unless we doubt the documents obtained by ABC, which I don’t.

Mr Obama’s critics are often not very clear what is behind their allegations. I presume they think that the White House wanted to avoid claims the murders were the result of terrorism because this would undermine his claim that al-Qaeda was seriously “degraded”. There’s also a vague sense he’s “soft on terror”.

The purpose of this deception was to make the American people re-elect Democrats who are soft on terrorism, by hiding the fact that Democrats are soft on terrorism. Democrats prefer to think that Tea Party, low-tax, small government, pro-life conservatives are terrorists. Not the radical Muslims who actually do terrorist attacks in the real world. Democrats think they need to be affirmed and defended from criticism.

Frankly, I think that Obama should feel obligated to resign over this self-serving deception. If the media had done their jobs before the election, we wouldn’t have this man as President. As it stands, we’ll just have to vote his America-blaming, terrorist-sympathizing Democrat Party out in 2016.

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ABC News: State Department scrubbed terrorism details from Benghazi talking points

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The mainstream media is slowly discovering the Benghazi scandal, eight months after it happened.

This time, it’s ABC News reporting.

Excerpt:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

Related: Read the Full Benghazi Talking Point Revisions

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

[…]Summaries of White House and State Department emails – some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard – show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland raised specific objections to this paragraph drafted by the CIA in its earlier versions of the talking points:

“The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned …”

The paragraph was entirely deleted.

Like the final version used by Ambassador Rice on the Sunday shows, the CIA’s first drafts said the attack appeared to have been “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” but the CIA version went on to say, “That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.” The draft went on to specifically name the al Qaeda-affiliated group named Ansar al-Sharia.

Once again, Nuland objected to naming the terrorist groups because “we don’t want to prejudice the investigation.”

The radically leftist BBC now has a story up as well.

Should Hillary Clinton be President after this revelation? This isn’t the first time she’s been caught in a lie and had to recant. The woman embellishes her past in order to appear more experienced and competent than she really is. Period. Like a little child tells lies about himself to seem more grown up.

In case you aren’t following the story, Guy Benson has a list of 12 revelations from the Benghazi hearings in this article.

Here are the ones I thought were most significant:

  1. The Democrats prevented Gregory Hicks from talking to the Congressional investigator.
  2. The Democrats demoted Hicks for objecting to the falsified talking points about the Youtube video.
  3. Ambassador Susan Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied about the Youtube video and protest.
  4. American forces were ordered to “stand down” rather than intervene to stop the terrorist attack.
  5. Hilary Clinton was aware of the repeated requests for more security in Libya.
  6. The ambassador was put in a dangerous situation at the behest of Hilary Clinton.
  7. No U.S. Marines were present to defend the Consulate during the attacks.
  8. The attack lasted eight hours, so there was ample time for the Obama administration to intervene.
  9. Reduced funding because of “austerity” had nothing to do with the lack of security.

I’ll just post the first two with video, because I blogged about 3 and 4 already.

Point #1:

(1) Murdered US Ambassador Chris Stevens’ second in command, Gregory Hicks, was instructed not to speak with a Congressional investigator by Sec. Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.  Hicks said he’d “never” faced a similar demand at any point during his distinguished 22-year diplomatic career. When he refused to comply with this request, the State Department dispatched an attorney to act as a “minder,” who insisted on sitting in on all of Hicks’ discussions with members of Congress (higher quality video is available here):

Video:

Point #2:

(2) When Hicks began to voice strenuous objections to the administration’s inaccurate talking points with State Department higher-ups, the administrationturned hostile.  After being lavishly praised by the president and the Secretary of State for his performance under fire, Assistant Secretary of State Beth Jones instantly reversed course and launched into a “blistering critique” of Hicks’ leadership.  He was subsequently “effectively demoted.”  Hicks called Rice’s talking points “stunning” and “embarrassing.”

Video:

This is important, so be sure and read the whole list.

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What we learned from the Benghazi whistle-blowers

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From the PJ Tatler, seven points:

  1. There were multiple stand-down orders, not just one.
  2. Ambassador Stevens’ reason for going to Benghazi has been cleared up.
  3. Clinton was briefed at 2 am on the night of the attack, was never told that a movie had anything to do with the attack by those on the ground in Libya, yet blamed the movie anyway.
  4. Whistleblowers were intimidated into silence.
  5. “The YouTube movie was a non-event in Libya.”
  6. Democrats were uninterested in getting at most of the facts, but were very interested in destroying Mark Thompson.
  7. House hearings are a poor way to determine who did what and why during and after the attack.

Here’s my favorite one:

5. “The YouTube movie was a non-event in Libya.” Hicks directly testified that the YouTube movie, for which a man remains in jail, was not in any way relevant to the attack in Benghazi. Why Obama, Clinton, Rice et al blamed that movie for the attack remains an unanswered question. Hicks said that no American on the ground in Libya that night believed the movie was to blame. He also testified that there was no protest prior to the attack. When the attack began, he was in Tripoli. He texted Stevens, who was in Benghazi, to advise him of the riot in Cairo at the U.S. embassy. In that riot, jihadists had stormed the walls and replaced the American flag with the black flag of Islam. Stevens had not been aware of the Cairo situation at all, but shortly after Hnicks texted him about it, Stevens called and told Hicks that the Benghazi consulate was under attack. He never mentioned a protest.

Hicks also testified that blaming the movie had strongly adverse real-world effects. According to him, it humiliated Libya’s president, who had correctly stated that Benghazi was a terrorist attack. Blaming the movie, Hicks said, did “immeasurable damage” to our relations with Libya and delayed the FBI investigation. On Sept. 12, Ambassador Susan Rice told the first of her many untruths, claiming in an email that the FBI investigation into the attack was already underway. It would not actually get underway for 17 days after the attack, by which time the scene of the attack had been compromised and contaminated.

We still do not know who decided to change the original CIA talking points and blame the movie, but the finger is pointing directly at Hillary Clinton. She was briefed by Hicks during the attack, the movie was never mentioned, but in her first public statement on September 12, she blamed the movie. Her subordinate, Ambassador Susan Rice, also blamed the movie the following weekend. The fact that Obama himself blamed the movie repeatedly, though, strongly suggests that he took part in the decision as well.

The Obama administration just flat out lied, because they didn’t want the American people to know that their policies of appeasement and moral equivalence make us less safe. Democrats aren’t serious about national security and foreign policy. Their goal with national security, as with anything, is to feel good about themselves. And they do that by pretending that our actual enemies are our allies, and that America is to blame for any attacks against us. Benghazi is the direct result of this attitude of apologizing, disarming and bowing to dictators. Weakness invites aggression. Strength deters aggression. That’s the way the world works, like it or not.

The Weekly Standard has an excellent podcast summarizing the findings, as well.

UPDATE: Guy Benson lists twelve findings from the Benghazi hearings on Townhall.com.

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