A dung beetle would strain himself pushing around a misdirection
so massive.
Even Jonathan Karl of ABC News has taken notice,
and he has nothing kind to say about Obama administration “talking points” on
Benghazi. Mr. Karl, it should be said, is not part of the
putative conservative conspiracy against progressive Democrats.
Concerning the CIA “talking points” that then Ambassador to
the UN Susan Rice pushed on several news outlets shortly after the American
Consulate was overrun and destroyed by Islamic terrorists, Mr. Karl notes that “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.”
According to Mr.
Karl, the initial CIA report noted that “The Agency has produced numerous
pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qaeda 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 (sic) previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also
contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”
This intelligence
displeased State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland who, perhaps feeling
pressure from higher-ups in the Obama administration, objected to the inclusion
of such intelligence because such inconvenient truths, as she wrote in an email
to officials at the White House “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?”
In a final
revision, the offending paragraph was entirely deleted.
The CIA’s first
draft had noted that the attack on the embassy appeared to be “spontaneously
inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” – later found to be an
incorrect assessment -- but pointedly noted as well, “That being said, we do
know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaeda participated in the
attack.” The first draft specifically identified the al Qaeda-affiliated
group as Ansar al-Sharia, occasioning yet another objection from the State
Department’s Ms. Nuland, who did not want to “prejudice the investigation” by
the mention of specific terrorist groups.
Deputy National
Security Advisor Ben Rhodes concurred and dispatched an email
stressing that State Department’s concerns needed to be addressed: “We must
make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those
of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI
investigation. We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow
morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.”
What no one will
say about the several visions and revisions of a CIA document that certainly
was more complete and accurate than the truncated final product at last given
the nod at Foggy Bottom is this: The procrustean editing was necessary because
a more accurate depiction of true events at Benghazi did not support
presidential campaign election rhetoric which suggested falsely that al-Qaeda
had been sufficiently degraded by Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton. Most of the hard data and all of the insufficient explanations seem to
point a finger in that direction. And it now becomes possible to ask: Is it
possible that an embassy and the lives of those in it were put at risk because
a president did not want his fictional campaign narrative to be overthrown by
the truth?
In the days
following the murderous assault on the American consulate in Benghazi by an
invigorated and deadly al-Qaeda connected offshoot, presidential spokesman Jay
Carney rose to a defense of the misleading remarks made by Ms. Rice at several
media venues. Apparently not under oath, he told reporters at the White House
press briefing on November 28, 2012:
“Those talking
points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best
assessments of what they thought had happened. The White House and the State
Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those
talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word
‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”
Mary McCarthy
once said of Lillian Hellman that every word she spoke was a lie, including
“and” and “but.” That may more appropriately have been said about Jay Carnie’s
media fish bait.
Mr. Karl’s report
may be the first indication that, at least on Benghazi, mainstream reporters
and commentator have had their fill of worms.
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