Doug Groothuis tweeted this article from the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

In his United Nations speech on Tuesday, President Obama talked about the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya and declared that “there should be no doubt that we will be relentless in tracking down the killers and bringing them to justice.” What he didn’t say is how relentless he’ll be in tracking down the security lapses and intelligence failures that contributed to the murders. Let’s say there’s some doubt about that.

None of the initial explanations offered by the White House and State Department since the assault on the Benghazi consulate has held up. First the Administration blamed protests provoked by an amateurish anti-Islam clip posted on YouTube. Cue Susan Rice, the U.N. Ambassador and leading candidate for Secretary of State in a second Obama term: “What happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction . . . as a consequence of the video, that people gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent.”

Administration officials also maintained that the diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt, the site of the first attacks this September 11, were properly defended and that the U.S. had no reason to prepare for any attack. “The office of the director of National Intelligence has said we have no actionable intelligence that an attack on our post in Benghazi was planned or imminent,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week, calling the security measures in place there “robust.”

Cell phone video footage and witness testimony from Benghazi soon undercut the Administration trope of an angry march “hijacked” by a few bad people. As it turned out, the assault was well-coordinated, with fighters armed with guns, RPGs and diesel canisters, which were used to set the buildings on fire. Ambassador Chris Stevens died of smoke inhalation. Briefing Congress, the Administration changed its story and said the attacks were pre-planned and linked to al Qaeda.

You’d think this admission would focus attention on why the compound was so vulnerable to begin with. But the Administration wants to avoid this conversation. The removal of all staff from Benghazi, including a large component of intelligence officers, would also seem to hinder their ability to investigate the attacks and bring the killers to justice.

[…]On April 10, for example, an explosive device was thrown at a convoy carrying U.N. envoy Ian Martin. On June 6, an improvised explosive device exploded outside the U.S. consulate. In late August, State warned American citizens who were planning to travel to Libya about the threat of assassinations and car bombings.

Despite all this, U.S. diplomatic missions had minimal security. Officials told the Journal that the Administration put too much faith in weak Libyan police and military forces. The night of the Benghazi attack, four lightly armed Libyans and five American security officers were on duty. The complex lacked smoke-protection masks and fire extinguishers. Neither the consulate in Benghazi nor the embassy in Tripoli were guarded by U.S. Marines, whose deployment to Libya wasn’t a priority.

Rummaging through the Benghazi compound, a CNN reporter found a seven-page notebook belonging to Ambassador Stevens. According to the network, the diary said he was concerned about the “never-ending” security threats in Benghazi and wrote that he was on an al Qaeda hit list. In deference to the family’s wishes, CNN didn’t quote directly from the diary and didn’t divulge any private information in it.

His worries are newsworthy, however, and can inform America’s response. But Mrs. Clinton’s long-time and closest media adviser chose to attack CNN. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philippe Reines called the network’s conduct “disgusting.” He then deployed words not fit for a family newspaper in an exchange with a reporter for the Web site BuzzFeed. Mr. Reines may wish to protect his boss’s legacy for her 2016 Presidential run, but that won’t be enhanced by the appearance of a cover-up.

Lack of preparation, lack of seriousness, blame-shifting and finger-pointing.

Bret Stephens has an article in the Wall Street Journal that added to that list of failures.

Excerpt:

The hour is 5 p.m., Sept. 11, Washington time, and the scene is an Oval Office meeting among President Obama, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi has been under assault for roughly 90 minutes. Some 30 U.S. citizens are at mortal risk. The whereabouts of Ambassador Stevens are unknown.

What is uppermost on the minds of the president and his advisers? The safety of Americans, no doubt. So what are they prepared to do about it? Here is The Wall Street Journal’s account of the meeting:

“There was no serious consideration at that hour of intervention with military force, officials said. Doing so without Libya’s permission could represent a violation of sovereignty and inflame the situation, they said. Instead, the State Department reached out to the Libyan government to get reinforcements to the scene.”

So it did. Yet the attack was far from over. After leaving the principal U.S. compound, the Americans retreated to a second, supposedly secret facility, which soon came under deadly mortar fire. Time to call in the troops?

“Some officials said the U.S. could also have sent aircraft to the scene as a ‘show of force’ to scare off the attackers,” the Journal reported, noting that there’s a U.S. air base just 450 miles away in Sicily. “State Department officials dismissed the suggestions as unrealistic. ‘They would not have gotten there in two hours, four hours or six hours.'”

The U.S. security detail only left Washington at 8 a.m. on Sept. 12, more than 10 hours after the attacks began. A commercial jet liner can fly from D.C. to Benghazi in about the same time.

450 miles? An F-15 Eagle can reach speeds of up to 1,600 miles an hour at high altitude. What is this two hour garbage?

I have said it before and I’ll say it again. You cannot entrust national security and foreign policy to Democrats. They just aren’t serious about these issues. All they can do is pull out of wars, cut defense budgets, hamstring the CIA, set up the Muslim Brotherhood in power, undercut our allies, and praise our enemies. They only care about winning the election, and after their failures are exposed, they play the blame game.

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From Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. (links removed)

Excerpt:

In the aftermath of a terrorist attack in Libya that killed our ambassador and three other Americans, the Obama administration was quick to scapegoat a film called “The Innocence of Muslims” for the attack, claiming that the film caused the attack. But in reality, the attack was pre-planned, and within 24 hours, the administration knew it was a terrorist attack, not a “spontaneous” eruption of outrage over the film, as it later repeatedly claimed on TV:

U.S. intelligence officials knew within 24 hours of the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya that it was a terrorist attack and suspected Al Qaeda-tied elements were involved, sources told Fox News — though it took the administration a week to acknowledge it.

The account conflicts with claims on the Sunday after the attack by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice that the administration believed the strike was a “spontaneous” event triggered by protests in Egypt over an anti-Islam film.

Two senior U.S. officials said the Obama administration internally labeled the attack terrorism from the first day in order to unlock and mobilize certain resources to respond, and that officials were looking for one specific suspect.

Yet, “four days later, the White House sent U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to five different Sunday talk shows to claim that the sacking and assassination sprang from a ‘spontaneous‘ demonstration. That no longer can be explained as initial confusion over conflicting reports; it is now clearly a lie told by the White House.” (The fact that terrorists, rather than demonstrators, overran the “poorly-secured” American consulate may have helped make it a “catastrophic intelligence loss.”)

This false claim resulted in a vast number of people calling for censorship or prosecution of the filmmaker.

Did you all hear about what Obama said about speech critical of Islam at the United Nations?

Look:

Banning speech because someone reacts violently to it sets a terrible precedent. It gives the most violent or angry members of society a veto over free speech and what issues are discussed. It is always possible to blame the victim of violence for inciting aggression by an angry person through expression of views that offended that person. (For example, when a security guard working for a conservative group was shot by a critic of the group, some people blamed the group’s rhetoric for supposedly creating a “climate of hate” that led the outraged shooter to react by attacking it, and said it must “share” the “blame” for the “growth of” such “violent acts.”)

The Obama administration has not advocated criminalizing speech against Islam. But at the United Nations, it has argued in favor of civil liability for speech that incites “discrimination” or “hostility” to Islam, based on the false assumption that civil liability is less subject to First Amendment limits. (The Supreme Court’s Hess and Brandenburg decisions protect even speech that incites violence or legal violations unless the speech intends and is likely to cause imminent lawless action.  The Administration is apparently unaware of, or does not agree with, federal appeals court rulings that apply those decisions to bar civil liability for speech that incites “discrimination.”) As the National Review notes, the much-criticized statement by the U.S. Embassy in Egypt deploring the “abuse” of free speech in America…

perfectly reflects the views of the United States government under Obama’s stewardship. . . In 2009, the Obama State Department ceremoniously joined with Muslim governments to propose a United Nations resolution that, as legal commentator Stuart Taylor observed, was “all-too-friendly to censoring speech that some religions and races find offensive.” . . .The sharia countries were happy with the compromise, though, because it also would have made unlawful speech that incites mere “discrimination” and “hostility” toward religion. Secretary Clinton’s feint was that this passed constitutional muster because such speech would not be made criminally unlawful. Yet the First Amendment says “make no law,” not “make no criminal law,” restricting speech. The First Amendment permits us to criticize in a way that may provoke hostility — it would be unconstitutional to suppress that regardless of whether the law purporting to do so was civil, as opposed to criminal.

What does it mean that the President of the United States would lie to the American people in order to justify cracking down on free speech? We know he doesn’t like religious liberty or private property or firearm ownership or the free market – must he also go against free speech now?

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