“Terrible. I cry every night. I don't sleep at night. I need
answers… Why was there no security for him? When they were supposed to have
security and the security that they did have was called back. It just -- things
do not add up and I'm just told lies.” So said Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith,
a State Department information officer, one of four Americans murdered in
Benghazi. The enduring agony of Mrs. Smith recalls the advice given by the
blind prophet Tiresias to an obdurate King Creon in Sophocles’ “Antigone.”
Self-will must bear the guilt of stubbornness.
Yield to the dead, and
outrage not a corpse
So long as the truth is scorned, Ambassador Chris Stevens and the brave people who died with him at the consulate in Benghazi will not be quiet in their graves. Honor must have a voice. The shattering truth about Benghazi will be told; blood will tell it. Whether the telling will change much is quite a different question. Power does have its privileges, and the Obama administration, in an attempt to subvert the truth, has buried it behind a literal wall of obfuscation.
The recent testimony of three direct witnesses before a
Congressional committee, as well as prior news accounts of the assault by
terrorists on the consulate in Benghazi, utterly destroys the order of
operative assumptions churned out by the Obama administration, then in a
campaign mode, before, during and after the murderous assault.
Even today, the Obama administration insists on the
following discredited narrative: 1) Early real-time reports indicated that the
assault on the consulate was a spinoff of a protest occasioned by a video that
defamed the prophet Mohammed; 2) As the administration gained more access to
accurate information, it abandoned an earlier view that Al-Qaida elements were
not involved in the assault.
The truth is just the opposite. The earliest report –
indeed, the very last words of Ambassador Stevens to his second in command,
“Greg Hicks, who testified recently before a Congressional panel] we are under
attack” – indicated right from the get-go that the embassy was under assault.
No early on the spot report mentions a protest.
Even before the assaults had ended, intelligence officials
had concluded, according to a report in the Weekly Standard written by Steven
Hayes, “that al Qaeda-linked
terrorists were involved. Senior administration officials, however, sought to
obscure the emerging picture and downplay the significance of attacks that
killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. The frantic process
that produced the changes to the talking points took place over a 24-hour
period just one day before Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations,
made her now-famous appearances on the Sunday television talk shows. The
discussions involved senior officials from the State Department, the National
Security Council, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
and the White House.”
Mr. Hayes’ report includes reproductions of two critical e-mails not previously made available to the
general public.
The Weekly
Standard story shows two revisions to an initial e-mail that provided the
foundation of the Obama administration “talking points” on the Benghazi
assaults.
An early cable
sent by the CIA station chief in Libya on September 12, immediately after the
attack on the consulate on September 11, a propitious day for terrorists,
clearly stated that U.S. facilities in Benghazi had come under terrorist attack.
It was this intelligence – very inconvenient to an administration that was in
the process of insisting during a presidential campaign that the effectiveness
of Al-Qaida had been degraded “that top
Obama officials would work so hard to obscure,” according to the Weekly
Standard report: “The frantic process that produced the changes to the talking
points took place over a 24-hour period just one day before Susan Rice, U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, made her now-famous appearances on the Sunday
television talk shows. The discussions involved senior officials from the State
Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence, and the White House.”
The laundering of
accurate information – indeed, the tailoring of data to make the talking points
conform to an Obama campaign procrustean bed – began after
Democrat Dutch Ruppersburger, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, requested unclassified guidance on what members of Congress could say in public comments on the assaults.
Democrat Dutch Ruppersburger, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, requested unclassified guidance on what members of Congress could say in public comments on the assaults.
An initial draft
prepared by the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis asserted that the U.S.
Government “know[s] that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated
in the attack.” The same draft noted that press reports “linked the attack to
Ansar al Sharia. The group has since released a statement that its leadership
did not order the attacks, but did not deny that some of its members were
involved.”
This first draft,
prepared in response to Mr. Ruppersburger request and widely distributed internally
for comment at 11:15 a.m. on Friday, September 14, (Version 1) was itself
subject to revision (Version 2).
According to The
Weekly Standard report: “This initial [Version 1] CIA draft included the
assertion that the U.S. government ‘knows[s] that Islamic extremists with ties
to al-Qaeda participated in the attack.’ That draft also noted that press reports
‘linked the attack to Ansar al Sharia. The group has since released a statement
that its leadership did not order the attacks, but did not deny that some of
its members were involved.’ Ansar al Sharia, the CIA draft continued, aims to spread
sharia law in Libya and ‘emphasizes the need for jihad.’ The agency draft also
raised the prospect that the facilities had been the subject of jihadist
surveillance and offered a reminder that in the previous six months there had
been ‘at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by
unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British
Ambassador’s convoy.’”
A second [Version
2] CIA amended draft provided more information concerning the jihadist threat
in both Egypt and Libya: “On 10 September we warned of social media reports
calling for a demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy and that jihadists
were threatening to break into the Embassy… The Agency has produced numerous
pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al Qaeda in Benghazi and Libya.”
Tellingly, the second draft no longer specified “Islamic extremists with ties
to al Qaeda” but mentioned only “Islamic extremists.” And the mention of
“attacks” in the first more accurate draft was changed to “demonstrations.”
An hour after the
amended version was distributed to officials in the interagency vetting process,
an official identified in the official House report only as a “senior State
Department official” raised “serious concerns” about the draft. The senior
official, since identified as Victoria Nuland, was concerned that members of
Congress might use the talking points to assail the State Department for “not
paying attention to Agency warnings.”
Addressing Ms.
Nuland’s concerns, the CIA made some minor changes and cut all references to
Ansar al Sharia. But Ms. Nuland was still not appeased. She advised that the changes did not “resolve
all my issues or those of my building leadership.” Her unnamed superiors, Ms.
Nuland, wrote, were unhappy.
“In an attempt to
address those concerns,” according to The Standard report, “CIA officials made
minor tweaks. But in a follow-up email at 9:24 p.m., Nuland wrote that the
problem remained and that her superiors—she did not say which ones—were unhappy.
Moments later, according to the House report, ‘White House officials responded
by stating that the State Department’s concerns would have to be taken into
account.’ One official—Ben Rhodes, The Weekly Standard is told, a top adviser
to President Obama on national security and foreign policy—further advised the
group that the issues would be resolved in a meeting of top administration
officials the following morning at the White House.”
The final
snipping of the initial and more accurate CIA report fell to deputy director of
the CIA Mike Morell, who made broad changes to the draft, according to sources
cited in The Standard report: “Morrell cut all or parts of four paragraphs of
the six-paragraph talking points—148 of its 248 words. Gone were the reference to
‘Islamic extremists,’ the reminders of agency warnings about al Qaeda in Libya,
the reference to ‘jihadists’ in Cairo, the mention of possible surveillance of
the facility in Benghazi, and the report of five previous attacks on foreign
interests.”
In a series of
revisions, the truth was rung out of the data available to the Obama
administration. It was left to the hapless Susan Rice to present the limbless,
truncated version of events to the general public in a series of television
appearances, during the course of which it was stressed that the attack on the
consulate and the murder of Ambassador Stevens and other American defenders of
the consulate was inspired by a video that had enraged protestors.
For anyone who has bothered to examine the data now available, this convenient fiction, serviceable
to the Obama administration as campaign filler, is more than preposterous; it
is the wall of misinformation behind which Ambassador Stevens and other brave
American yet lie, immured and silent.
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