Verne Strickland Blogmaster / October 30, 2012
October 26, 2012 By
Matthew Vadum
FRONTPAGEMAG.COM
Obama
administration emails leaked to news organizations about last month’s
terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, paint a shocking picture of the
administration’s incompetence and callousness.
During the military-style assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi
on Sept. 11, the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, four American
officials died, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.
On the day of the attack, a few hours before he was raped and murdered
by adherents of the so-called religion of peace, Stevens wrote in an
email that a local Libyan commander in Benghazi “expressed growing
frustration with police and security forces (who were too weak to keep
the country secure) …”
It was a sad, prescient understatement.
For two weeks after the attack the Obama administration said over and
over and over again that the incident in Benghazi was inspired by a
low-quality anti-Islam video on YouTube. Eventually the administration
acknowledged it was a terrorist attack.
But those who have been following the disturbing developments in
Libya with an open mind know the Obama administration has been lying
about what happened there from the start.
The most charitable conclusion one can draw is that during the attack
the Obama White House froze under pressure, unable or unwilling to act,
as the president geared up for a fundraising event in fabulous Las
Vegas, Nevada.
The less charitable, but more likely conclusion, is that the White
House made a conscious, calculated decision to let American officials
perish overseas, fully expecting the incurious pro-Obama media to ignore
what really happened.
We now know that U.S. officials monitored an audio feed of the
Benghazi attack in real time, as CBS News reported. During the attack,
U.S. forces were in place in nearby Sicily, an hour or so away, but the
order to fly to Benghazi in an attempt to rescue the besieged staff at
the consulate never came.
That order was never issued by President Obama, probably because he
knew it would reveal his policy of appeasement towards Islamic
totalitarians to be in shambles as the Middle East and North Africa fell
into the hands of America’s enemies.
Former CIA officer Clare M. Lopez, now a senior fellow at the Center
for Security Policy, said Stevens knew al-Qaeda was targeting him but he
lacked adequate security.
The Benghazi saga is a massive scandal, Lopez
told
Glenn Beck. “It’s huge, first of all, because we’ve got four dead
Americans,” she said. “That’s the worst part of it all and nobody went
to their assistance.”
Intelligence chief James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and
David Petraeus all know what really happened in Benghazi, Lopez opined.
“This has to be brought out. This has to be made known to the public.
That this is going on and that our administration was not only working
with the bad guys, was working with al-Qaeda linked militias and jihadis
to overthrow [President Bashar Hafez] Assad in Syria, but that they let
our mission go down. They let our ambassador and others die. In real
time, watching it happen, and they didn’t do anything about it,” Lopez
said.
The Benghazi post-mortem cover-up appears to have been orchestrated
by Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, investigative journalist Ed Klein
told Andrew Wilkow on TheBlaze TV on Wednesday.
“In addition to Valerie Jarrett, the CIA got cables, the Department
of Defense got cables, the NSA got cables during the attack on Benghazi,
in addition to the emails that have since been made public. We know
that there are cables that we haven’t seen yet confirming the State
Department cable that this was an al-Qaeda linked attack.”
Klein said Clinton has documentary evidence that she previously asked
for more security in Benghazi but that she won’t release it because it
would torpedo Obama’s reelection bid and infuriate Democrats she might
want to call upon should she run for president herself in 2016.
The late ambassador was painfully aware that Benghazi had been on the
verge of exploding for some time. In a diplomatic cable in June,
Stevens
noted that “Islamic extremism” was on the rise and that “the Al-Qaeda flag” was flying over buildings outside Benghazi.
As the
Washington Times reports, Stevens also wrote that
attacks in Libya “targeting international organizations and foreign
interests” were on the rise. An attack in June on the Benghazi mission
blew a hole in a security wall, he indicated.
“Libyan security officials purport to have launched investigations,”
Stevens wrote. One of those officials “shared his private opinion that
the attacks were the work of extremists who are opposed to Western
influence in Libya.”
“A number of local contacts agreed, noting that Islamic extremism
appears to be on the rise in eastern Libya and that the Al-Qaeda flag
has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and
training facilities” approximately 100 miles east of Benghazi, the
ambassador wrote.
In a cable dated Aug. 8, Stevens expressed concern that the “absence
of significant deterrence” had “contributed to a security vacuum.”
As ABC News
reported,
a State Department email dated May 3, 2012, showed the department
turned down a request from officials in Libya to retain a DC-3 airplane
to help with security. Stevens was copied on the email.
A spokesman for the House Oversight Committee said the “State
Department’s naive determination to follow rigid bureaucratic policies,
instead of making common sense decisions that took the serious threat of
terrorism conveyed by those on the ground into account, appears to have
been a significant factor in the Benghazi Consulate’s lack of
preparedness.”
As previously reported, leaked State Department emails dated Sept. 11, 2012, that were
published
this week show officials knew soon after the attack that Ansar
al-Sharia, a Libyan terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda, had claimed
responsibility for the assault on the consulate.
The emails found their way to as many as 400 U.S. national security,
military, and diplomatic officials during the attack. The electronic
missives were time-stamped in Eastern time and often bore the subheading
SBU, which stands for “Sensitive But Unclassified.”
The initial email from 4:05 p.m. contains the subject header: “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack (SBU).”
“The Regional Security Officer reports the diplomatic mission is
under attack,” read the email. “Embassy Tripoli reports approximately 20
armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well.
Ambassador Stevens, who is currently in Benghazi, and four COM personnel
are in the compound safe haven. The 17th of February militia is
providing security support … The operations Center will provide updates
as available.”
A second email stamped 4:54 p.m. contains “Update 1: U.S. Diplomatic
Mission in Benghazi (SBU)” as a subject line. “Embassy Tripoli reports
the firing at the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi has stopped and
the compound has been cleared. A response team is on site attempting to
locate COM personnel.”
A third email stamped 6:07 p.m. features a subject line reading
“Update 2: Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack
(SBU).”
“Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook
and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli,” it
indicates.
Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely in the Age of Obama, America’s
mainstream media has shown little interest in the atrocities in Libya
as it focuses on silly distractions like what Mitt Romney really,
secretly, truly, in his little capitalist heart made of coal, may have
meant when he used the incomplete phrase “binders full of women” in the
heat of an intense presidential debate.
Not much media attention has focused on the fact that Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton’s handpicked chairman of the Department of State’s
investigation of the Benghazi atrocities is an apologist for Islamic
terrorism who has a cozy relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran,
the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
As
Frontpage Magazine
was first to report this week, the chairman, former Ambassador Thomas
R. Pickering, participated in a panel discussion Tuesday night in
Washington, D.C. on “what role the faith community can play in fighting
Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness. The term is used the same
way American leftists use the word “racist” to shut down debate.
Many of those few journalists who are following the Benghazi story
are in full-on damage control mode in order to help their hero,
President Obama, win reelection.
For example, confirmation bias-afflicted
Mother Jones reporter Adam Serwer, long a reliably useful idiot in the service of Obama,
argued
yesterday that a single Middle East analyst’s newly discovered
skepticism about one of the State Department emails sent during the
attack invalidated all criticism of the administration’s handling of the
Benghazi saga.
Because no record could be found on social media websites of al-Qaeda
linked terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia claiming responsibility for the
massacre, the group couldn’t possibly be tied to the attack, Serwer
wrote in a piece containing the in-your-face headline, “GOP’s Benghazi
Smoking Gun Goes Up in Smoke.”
Nothing to see here. Move along.
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Study produced a pile of undeliverable letters.
