Tag Archives: Misinformation

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White House told that terrorists took credit for Benghazi attack within two hours

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According to Yahoo News, the first e-mail arrived 20-30 minutes after the attack started. (H/T Jared)

Excerpt:

The records obtained by Reuters consist of three emails dispatched by the State Department’s Operations Center to multiple government offices, including addresses at the White House, Pentagon, intelligence community and FBI, on the afternoon of September 11.

The first email, timed at 4:05 p.m. Washington time – or 10:05 p.m. Benghazi time, 20-30 minutes after the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission allegedly began – carried the subject line “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack” and the notation “SBU”, meaning “Sensitive But Unclassified.”

The text said the State Department’s regional security office had reported that the diplomatic mission in Benghazi was “under attack. Embassy in Tripoli reports approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well.”

The message continued: “Ambassador Stevens, who is currently in Benghazi, and four … personnel are in the compound safe haven. The 17th of February militia is providing security support.”

A second email, headed “Update 1: U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi” and timed 4:54 p.m. Washington time, said that the Embassy in Tripoli had reported that “the firing at the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi had stopped and the compound had been cleared.” It said a “response team” was at the site attempting to locate missing personnel.

A third email, also marked SBU and sent at 6:07 p.m. Washington time, carried the subject line: “Update 2: Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack.”

The message reported: “Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli.”

While some information identifying recipients of this message was redacted from copies of the messages obtained by Reuters, a government source said that one of the addresses to which the message was sent was the White House Situation Room, the president’s secure command post.

Other addressees included intelligence and military units as well as one used by the FBI command center, the source said.

The American Enterprise Institute has the Benghazi attack timeline:

Rather, the story of Benghazi is that while the White House’s initial response may have been confusion (because other attacks were taking place at the same time), very soon thereafter, the outright lying began. And now that we have seen the emails that went to the White House within two hours of the attack naming the perpetrators — a known terrorist group operating in eastern Libya — the fact that officials from the president on down were intentionally and falsely insisting the 9/11/12 attack was not an act of terrorism is screamingly obvious.

Let’s review the timeline (h/t to the Washington Post) once again:

Here’s what the president said on September 12:

“Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts… No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”

Note the reference to the YouTube video in the “reject all efforts to denigrate” line, and the generic references to “acts of terror” which the president falsely insisted (with assistance from CNN’s Candy Crowley) was an assertion that Benghazi was in fact an act of terror.

Here’s Jay Carney, White House spox, the following day:

“I think it’s important to note with regards to that protest that there are protests taking place in different countries across the world that are responding to the movie that has circulated on the Internet.”

Again, the movie.

Here’s Hillary Clinton on September 14:

“We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with. It is hard for the American people to make sense of that because it is senseless, and it is totally unacceptable.”

And Carney the same day:

“We were not aware of any actionable intelligence indicating that an attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi was planned or imminent. That report is false.” 

And then Obama’s U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice hit every Sunday show with this message on September 16:

“Based on the best information we have to date … it began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo, where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video. “

[…] Obama doubled down on the lie that it was all about the video in his address to the United Nations General Assembly. On September 25, he said:

“That is what we saw play out in the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world.”

[…]Bottom line? Barack Obama was willfully and knowingly lying to the American people. Why? To protect the meme that he had al Qaeda and affiliates/sympathizers like Libya’s Ansar al Sharia on the run.

This is an impeachable offense. Obama should face impeachment for lying to the American people. This scandal is on the same level as Watergate. It’s an abuse of power designed to exonerate militant Islam while making the Obama administration look innocent for their national security blunders and their policies of apologizing to our enemies and unlilateral disarmament.

UPDATE: My favorite defense policy analyst Frank Gaffney has a more sinister view of why Obama lied about Benghazi: the Obama administration was involved in arming Islamic groups that included terrorists.

Check it out:

The evidence suggests that the Obama administration has not simply been engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists who have taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East. Starting in March 2011, when American diplomat J. Christopher Stevens was designated the liaison to the “opposition” in Libya, the Obama administration has been arming them, including jihadists like Abdelhakim Belhadj, leader of the al Qaeda franchise known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

Once Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown, Stevens was appointed ambassador to the new Libya run by Mr. Belhadj and his friends. Not surprisingly, one of the most important priorities for someone in that position would be to try to find and secure the immense amount of armaments that had been cached by the dictator around the country and systematically looted during and after the revolution.

One of the places in Libya most awash with such weapons in the most dangerous of hands is Benghazi. It now appears that Stevens was there — on a particularly risky day, with no security to speak of and despite now copiously documented concerns about his own safety and that of his subordinates — for another priority mission: sending arms recovered from the former regime’s stocks to the “opposition” in Syria. As in Libya, the insurgents are known to include al Qaeda and other Shariah-supremacist groups, including none other than Abdelhakim Belhadj.

Fox News has chronicled how the Al Entisar, a Libyan-flagged vessel carrying 400 tons of cargo, docked on Sept. 6 in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. It reportedly supplied both humanitarian assistance and arms — including deadly SA-7 man-portable surface-to-air missiles — apparently destined for Islamists, again including al Qaeda elements, in Syria.

What cries out for further investigation — and debate in the remaining days of this presidential election — is whether this shipment was part of a larger covert Obama effort to transfer weapons to our enemies that could make the Iran-Contra scandal, to say nothing of Operation Fast and Furious, pale by comparison.

SA-7 man-portable surface-to-air missiles can be used to attack civilian and military aircraft.

UPDATE: Obama refused to call in troops to defend the embassy – they were only 1 hour away.

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In tonight’s debate, Romney must go after Obama about the Benghazi cover-up

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Mitt Romney must go after Obama on the Benghazi cover-up in tonight’s foreign policy debate.

To prep you for the debate, here’s a review of what we know about the Benghazi cover-up from Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

America’s slain ambassador in Libya repeatedly sought security which went unheeded, new documents show. The CIA, meanwhile, told Washington within 24 hours that the Benghazi attack was terrorism. So where was our president?

The sorry answer is that it’s starting to look as though he and his team knew all along that the attack in Libya was a terrorism from the start.

That hasn’t been what he’s presented to the public. But instead of owning up to it, the White House has perpetrated the red herring that a old YouTube video depicting Islam in a bad light was the real reason, because calling terrorism terrorism would reveal their their Middle East policy failure.

Friday, the evidence piled up. The New York Times reported that 166 pages of internal State Department documents released by GOP congressmen showed that now-murdered Ambassador Christopher Stevens and other U.S. officials had repeatedly warned that security was deteriorating in Benghazi and they pleaded for additional protection. The Libyan government, he wrote on Sept. 11, was “too weak to keep the country secured.” Stevens’ alarms went ignored.

The Benghazi consulate was actually attacked a couple of times before the Sept. 11 attack. Security was not improved after the first two attacks.

More:

After Stevens’s brutal death that night, the CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington within 24 hours that the attack was carried out by terrorists, not spontaneous protestors, according to U.S. officials who told the Associated Press.

That isn’t what the Obama administration spent five weeks telling the American people.

The White House attempted ferociously to convince U.S. voters that the lethal Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was nothing more than a spontaneous demonstration that got out of hand and as such, something the government could not control.

More details in this Wall Street Journal article, which discusses the conflicting timelines and the open questions.

It concludes with this:

In Tuesday night’s debate with Mitt Romney, President Obama claimed to have “told” the American people that Benghazi was a terror attack the very next day, Sept. 12, when speaking from the Rose Garden. The assertion was untrue, despite moderator Candy Crowley’s ruling to the contrary. The president had only spoken generally of terror attacks, and Benghazi would have been understood to fall under that umbrella only if it had been acknowledged as a terror attack.

On Sept. 12, that was not the administration’s line. Not until his afternoon appearance on “The View” on Sept. 25—the “two weeks” of delay that Mr. Romney alluded to in the debate—did the president offer Americans an explanation of Benghazi that made no reference to a protest over a video. The YouTube connection had figured prominently in his Benghazi pronouncements as late as Mr. Obama’s Sept. 20 appearance on Univision, and even in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on the morning of Sept. 25.

You can watch the video above, which features clips of Obama and his administration claiming that the the attack was caused by a protest over a Youtube video, despite the reports from the CIA and the State Department to the contrary. Perhaps Obama was not aware of the threat because he was not attending his Presidential Daily Briefings, but was instead out campaigning in Las Vegas?

It would be nice if Romney brought up questions about why America was involved in Egypt and Libya in tonight’s debate. I am more hawkish than most, and I would not have gone into Egypt and Libya at all. If we are going in anywhere, it should be Syria. Interfering in Egypt and Libya could only help our enemies in Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. I would also like to see Romney attack Obama about his decisions to increase foreign aid to countries run by people who support us, as well as his weak response to previous terrorist attacks. I would just like Obama to explain what his foreign policy is, and explain his plan for dealing with Iran and China, in particular.

Unfortunately, it looks as though we will have an even more biased moderator than Martha Raddatz and Candy Crowley put together.

Here are the details of the debate tonight:

Third presidential candidates’ debate between Obama, Romney

  • Topic: Foreign policy
  • Date: Monday, Oct. 22
  • Time: 9 – 10:30 p.m. EDT
  • Location: Lynn University, Boca Raton, Fla.
  • Moderator: Bob Schieffer, chief Washington correspondent, CBS News, and moderator, “Face the Nation”
  • Format: “The format for the debate will be identical to the first presidential debate and will focus on foreign policy.”

Be sure and tune in, or watch it via streaming at Fox News Live.

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Unmanned drone observed Benghazi attack, no help sent for 7 hours

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From CBS News. (H/T Bad Blue)

Excerpt:

The closer we get to the election, the harder Republicans in Congress are pushing for answers to a big question: What really happened in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya last month that killed the U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans?

Some lawmakers are asking why U.S. military help from outside Libya didn’t arrive as terrorists battered more than 30 Americans over the course of more than seven hours. The assault was launched by an armed mob of dozens that torched buildings and used rocket propelled grenades, mortars and AK-47 rifles.

CBS News has been told that, hours after the attack began, an unmanned Predator drone was sent over the U.S. mission in Benghazi, and that the drone and other reconnaissance aircraft apparently observed the final hours of the protracted battle.

The State Department, White House and Pentagon declined to say what military options were available. A White House official told CBS News that, at the start of the attack, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “looked at available options, and the ones we exercised had our military forces arrive in less than 24 hours, well ahead of timelines laid out in established policies.”

But it was too late to help the Americans in Benghazi. The ambassador and three others were dead.

According to the CI operatives in the video above, including a former station chief, the Situation Room in the White House would have been immediately informed of the attack. They could have ordered an air strike to push the attack back. They could have ordered the drone to open fire. But they did nothing. This is not surprising given the other actions of the administration to undermine our national security.

But why did they do nothing? Could it be that the Obama administration was afraid of the backlash from the terrorists? Could it be that they were afraid of the perception that killing Bin Laden did nothing to stop Al Qaida? Could it be that they knew immediately that it was weakness and disarmament in Benghazi that had provoked the evil terrorists to attack? Could it be that this terrorist attack undermined their “Arab Spring”?

It will be interesting to see much of this comes up in the foreign policy debate tomorrow (Monday) night.

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