Benghazi: the coverup

They lied over and over again. That's not some minor hiccup. Don't you atleast want an explanation from them why they lied to the public about this (although realy we know exactly why they lied)?

 

The president of the United States, the Secretary of State and the US ambassador to the United Nations lied to the American people about the events surrounding the death of the US Ambassador to Libya and 3 other individuals. They attempted to hide the facts of a terrorist attack from the American people.

I don't think this is an issue to vote against Obama because of if you support his policies, but there should be heads rolling.

Edit: They also didn't just make a "screw-up" or "get the facts wrong." They invented a scenario that didn't happen as a way to hide the truth and shifted the conversation onto something totally different. You had people saying that the families should sue the filmmaker for wrongful death!

 

Eh. The first day, they might have been genuinely confused about it. Romney was certainly confused about the Cairo Embassy statement and I think Obama was too. It was later the same day I heard (which was the day after), that I read an article that State thought it might be a planned attack. If they were trying to cover it up, I'll be more upset they did it so badly than that they tried at all.

Then the messaging was confused by the fact that you did have riots in Cairo and other places because of The Innocence of Muslims which also had to be addressed. With an election to win, Obama obviously wouldn't want to backtrack and say he was originally wrong about the Benghazi attack, just like Romney wouldn't admit he misunderstood the Cairo Embassy statement. They both just kept going, trying to curl the message into a more suitable trajectory and hoping most people would forget how it started. So, between Obama's unwillingness to admit his original statements were wrong and the need to address the riots in other places and head-off the potential for another Embassy to be breached by rioters, Obama conflated the two events into one.

So, it wasn't transparent. He was dishonest about what he knew and when he knew it. But, he didn't suppress reports that it was a terror attack from the media. He later admitted that it was a terror attack and there was no protest; he just didn't admit he was wrong earlier or acknowledge what he's saying now is the opposite of what he said earlier. It's a lot like the pivot Bush did on the Iraq War, changing the motive of the war when no WMD were found without ever admitting he had been wrong. But, I had access to the information thanks to our free press. I knew the truth and could parse the talk about protesters and the talk about terrorists. Our electoral system makes our politicians act this way. If you want democracy, accept the politicians will be lying weasels. That's business as usual; no need for heads to roll for that.

 

Not sure I can agree with your take. Look at this timeline (snipped out a lot of irrelevant stuff) from USA Today:

As much as 14 days after the attack Obama was still beating the drum that there was a mob that was protesting the video. This despite the fact that he already knew as early as 12 days prior that it was a terrorist act. Then yesterday the whitehouse admits that there was no protest, no mob whatsoever.

I don't see how you can call this anything but blatantly lying.

 

I will still vote for Obama based on a number of issues. However, lets not kid ourselves, Obama has only continued the lies and usurpation of power and sacrifice of our civil and Constitutional rights. I do not think it will get better, the genie is out of the bottle.

 

Well, I just got back from the hearing. There was a lot of talking, but honestly it was pretty much all the same after two hours.

I'll actually post detailed notes of almost everything that happened if people want them, but I'll make a few observations: ****-up before conspiracy.

It's pretty clear from the hearing that the State Department screwed up. HUGE. I mean, really really screwed up, in some frankly ridiculous ways. And while they repeatedly kept stating that they sincerely believed the Youtube story up until the 16th when Rice gave her press conference, I have difficulty believing them. It just has some ridiculous implausibilities ( like the fact that the State officials had constant communication with Stevens yet never seemd to notice the tiny fact that there never actually was a protest in front of the Embassy in Benghazi) The buildings did not meet safety standards, not enough guys, blah blah blah.

But I'm hesitant to tie this into Obama, who no one actually bothered to mention - in fact, a few Dems disparaged Mitt Romney's response on that day, but no Republican never mentioned the President or attacked him directly in any way. Would also note that Dems criticized the Republicans for slashing spending as that apparently would have meant more money for embassy security.

So yeah, a few things which I picked up.

 

Thanks for posting. I'd like to see your detailed breakdown.

The only reason I tie it to Obama is because of his statements on Letterman, the View and elsewhere. If State admits to knowing the truth by the 16th, why was Obama still citing a mob and the video on the 25th?

 

Good stuff, thanks. I was writing a piece (albeit a very watered down one) for my school paper about this, and found out that the embassy attacks in 1983 (Kuwait and Beirut) changed how the US protects its' embassies and that a subdivision of the State Department (not the president like some people were saying) is in charge of keeping the embassy safe. I wonder if there will be another change to how our embassies are protected following this.

 

I don't think we're disagreeing by much. I said it was lying. Where we perhaps differ is that I'm speculating that the lie started from a misconception on Day 1 that couldn't be publically acknowledged and corrected because it would be politically embarassing to admit being wrong and/or because it would compromise messaging on the larger issue of widespread anti-American protests over the movie; whereas the implication of your approach is that Obama knew the truth from the start and chose to lie from the beginning to hide an act of terrorism from Americans so that no one would know Obama allowed a terror attack on his watch. Neither option is good, obviously.

I suppose I'm just not mad about it because I knew it was a terror attack back on 9/12 or 9/13. And all the statements since from all these officials are attempts to control the situation -- the election, the relationship with Libya, security issues, the islamophobe movie, the protests all over the world. They never deceived me, just like Bush never decieved me about Iraqi WMD. They say what they have to say to achieve their objectives. I'm more upset about the failure to close Gitmo and extending Bush tax cuts because he did deceive me, doing the opposite of what he led me to believe.

The only thing worth being mad about it why the consulate didn't have enough security. And, I don't yet know why it is.

 

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight............

 

"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," he says.

 

There were no protests at the embassy and the statement is obviously meant to continue the narrative that there was one that the extremists used as their tool to attack the embassy.

 

I can accept your scenario as plausible. Your scenario though necessitates massive issues in state and the intelligence department. Like you said, neither option is good.

 

An eyewitness disagree with you:

http://observers.france24.com/conte...ambassador-libya-ansar-al-sharia-film-muslims

Meanwhile in Benghazi, angry demonstrators gathered in front of the US consulate. During the evening, armed men managed to get inside the building and open fire on the consulate’s security forces, forcing them to evacuate the building.

"I was out with a few friends yesterday evening around 9 or 10 p.m., when we drove into the area where the consulate is located. All of a sudden, we were caught in a huge crowd, ..."

 

If there weren't issues, they would have put enough security in the first place to keep the attack from succeeding. In no scenario does Obama actually benefit from the attack, so the only reason it could have succeeded is because Admin didn't know enough to prevent it. That's obviously an intelligence and a security failure. Even if the ambassador knew he was in danger, the White House was obviously completely blindsided. The fact that neither Obama nor Romney seemed to know the context of the Cairo Embassy statement when it was made seems to support that notion. The fog of war.

That happens; we can't reasonably expect Obama and his Cabinet to know everything, anticipate everything, and keep an accurate read on a million different threats. You can expect the bureaucracy of the State department to have crafted adequate security protocols and standards to deal with unexpected attacks in their normal course of business. If someone gets fired over Stevens' death, it should probably be Joe Blow, Director of Embassy Security.

Of course, if you want to punish Obama at the ballot box over telling lies after the fact, I think that's justified. I think whatever you want to judge a candidate on is fair game. I thought the bs was no big deal and imo so transparent as to be invisible,* but some people will take it harder than I did.


* Of course, I also thought Bush's claims that we had to attack Iraq because they had WMD and were going to use them on us were also a pathetic transparent lie that no one would fall for. But, somehow we did.

 

Worse than Watergate?

 

After B Costanza got kicked out of the White house, more scandals will surface and they will dwarf Benghazi.

I can't think of a president that does more harm to America in a short 4 year span!