Libya Explained, Plus More Questions

Behind the Benghazi cover-up
By: Patrick J. Buchanan
10/16/2012 10:21 AM

On Sept. 11, scores of men with automatic weapons and RPGs launched a night assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and set the building ablaze. Using mortars, they launched a collateral attack on a safe house, killing two more Americans, as other U.S. agents fled to the airport.

On Sept. 14, White House press secretary Jay Carney said the attack came out of a spontaneous protest caused by an anti-Muslim video on YouTube.

On Sept. 16, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice told the entire nation the attack had not been premeditated or preplanned but emanated from a spontaneous protest of the nasty video.

On Sept. 25, Obama at the United Nations mentioned the video six times.

But when they were pushing this tale, what did the White House actually know?

For we have now learned that the assault was observed in near real time by the State Department’s Charlene Lamb, who was in contact with the security section at the Benghazi compound.

The next day, Sept. 12, Fox News and Eli Lake of The Daily Beast reported that U.S. intelligence had concluded it was terrorism. Within 24 hours of the attack, U.S. intelligence had identified some of the terrorists as members of an al-Qaida affiliate.

Thus either administration higher-ups were ignorant for more than a week of what their own agents knew, and are thus manifestly incompetent, or they colluded in a cover-up and orchestrated deception.

As the facts are revealed, the weight of evidence tilts toward the latter conclusion.

Why? Because we now know there never was any protest at the Benghazi compound — not against an anti-Muslim video or anything else.

And if there was no protest, who sent Carney out to blame the attack on the protest? And if there was no protest, who programmed Rice and put her on five separate Sunday talk shows to attribute the massacre to a protest that never happened?

If real-time intelligence and U.S. agents at the scene knew it was premeditated, preplanned terrorism by Sept. 12, who told Rice to deny specifically on Sept. 16 that the attack was premeditated or preplanned?

Indeed, why was Rice sent out at all? She is not in the chain of command. Why she accepted the assignment is obvious. She wants to be Hillary Clinton’s successor as secretary of state. But who put her up to this? Who pushed her out front to mislead us?

The CIA’s David Petraeus or Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should have been sent out to say what we knew, five days after the massacre. As Chris Stevens reported to the secretary of state and President Obama, why was Hillary or National Security Adviser Tom Donilon not sent out to explain what had happened to Stevens and the others?

Looking back, Carney and Rice appear to have been used by their superiors.

Carney would never have gone out to speculate on his own about what happened in Benghazi. His line on Sept. 14 had to have been fed to him by the White House chief of staff, Donilon, Obama or all of them.

As for Rice, someone contacted those five TV networks to put her on. And the party line she delivered — the opposite of the truth — had to have been fed to her, almost word for word — by Donilon or the chief of staff.

Could Donilon or Hillary have been in the dark about what Rice was going to say? Could they have still been in the dark about what had happened five days before in Benghazi, when Hillary’s own deputy Charlene Lamb had followed the terrorist attack in near real time?

Hillary and the entire Obama national security team are in that famous photo with Obama watching Seal Team Six in Abbottabad when Osama bin Laden was taken down.

Was the National Security Council alerted by Lamb when she was observing the attack in near real time? Did the NSC also observe?

Was the president told by the NSC that we were getting real-time intel and video from Benghazi, and would he like to see?

There is an even more fundamental question:

Why did the White House persist with the phony story of a protest against a video being the cause of Ambassador Stevens’ death, when they had to know there was no protest?

The most plausible explanation is that the truth — we were being hit with the worst terror attack since 9/11 in a city we saved — would have exposed Obama’s boasting about his Libya triumph and al-Qaida being “on the run” and “on the path to defeat” as absurd propaganda.

Al-Qaida is now in Libya, Mali, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Pakistan.

And the epidemic of anti-American riots across the Muslim world, with Arab Spring elections bringing to power Islamist regimes, testify to the real truth. After four years of Obama, it is America that is on the run in the Middle East.

But we can’t let folks find that out until after Nov. 6.

Hence the Benghazi cover-up.

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Buchanan hones in on two key questions. One, how could the White House not have known it was a terrorist attack? And two, why was the UN Ambassador sent out to peddle a tall tale?


Of the two, the latter question interests me more. I assume the WH did know, but assumed they could hide the truth at least until after the election. They didn't count on CNN getting to the compound before they did and unearthing embarrassing documents.

Did Rice see this as her way of making her bones with Obama and paving the way for Secretary of State? Or was she too dumb to see a potential setup? Hillary has already thrown her under the bus, refusing to take responsibility for Rice's statements.

Or as, Buchanan hints, did all the obvious players refuse to lie for obama? Patreus, Clinton, Panetta and Donilon are all experienced Washington power players and weren't going near this tar baby. You don't survive in this town without a sixth sense for career-ending traps. For Rice, the payoff may have looked worth the risk, particularly since a spectacular implosion of Obama's foreign policy might cost him the election anyway and Rice's chance of promotion.

 

republican better drop this one before someone reminds the voters that the republicans gutted the embassy security budget:




GOP Rep: I ‘Absolutely’ Voted To Cut Funding For Embassy Security
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said today that he voted to cut funding for U.S. embassy security amid political attacks from Republicans that the Obama administration did not do enough to secure the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya that was attacked last month.
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2...rity/?mobile=nc

For fiscal 2013, the GOP-controlled House proposed spending $1.934 billion for the State Department’s Worldwide Security Protection program — well below the $2.15 billion requested by the Obama administration. House Republicans cut the administration’s request for embassy security funding by $128 million in fiscal 2011 and $331 million in fiscal 2012. (Negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate restored about $88 million of the administration’s request.) Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans’ proposed cuts to her department would be “detrimental to America’s national security” — a charge Republicans rejected.

[GOP vice presidential nominee Paul] Ryan, [Rep. Darrell] Issa and other House Republicans voted for an amendment in 2009 to cut $1.2 billion from State operations, including funds for 300 more diplomatic security positions. Under Ryan’s budget, non-defense discretionary spending, which includes State Department funding, would be slashed nearly 20 percent in 2014, which would translate to more than $400 million in additional cuts to embassy security.

 

Team Obama and their buddies in the MSM are doing their level best to try and spin this into a Romney/conservative story. Won't work except with those already blinded by political bias.
Facts are facts. They lied about the events and how they came about for several days. There's no other way to explain it. Rice got the short straw to go out and sing the company song. She looked like a fool.
Budget cuts aren't going to cut it either with anyone who has an ounce of common sense. You simply re-allocate some of your security resources. So simple a thing to do and yet they didn't. Why? Because doing so would have went directly against the terrorists are on the run baloney they had been putting out prior to the attack. People died and it's all on the Obama administration. Don't hold your breath expecting them to take responsibility. Stall till election day is the memo going out, then duck and cover afterwards while shifting blame to some administration lacky.

 

Actually FT, in the eyes of the GOP and most people there is an easy answer for that.

Cuts to our government are necessary to get out of the debt hole that we're in. Once the cuts are implemented, it is on whomever is in charge to APPROPRIATELY allocate the existing resources. It is unrealistic to take for granted that every request for additional funding will be granted. Nobody in the public sector or the private sector gets a blank check.

 

The other thing I'm trying to figure out is where they are getting those numbers from. We are talking about the Consulate in Libya, NOT THE EMBASSY. So embassy security doesn't really matter here. On the budget we are specifically talking about Diplomatic & Consular Programs (D&CP).

But the Obama Admin also created the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget that would fund the activities that he no longer wanted to call "War on Terror". These are specifically allotted to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Here is the wording for justification of new funding;

Notice how much additional was allocated to D&CP-OCO for 2012.

These are the actual numbers from the budget, red means Bush was in charge, blue means Obama. Obviously requests are made Feb of the prior year.



There are a few points that are interesting to note. The first year that Obama Admin started making the budget, the requests skyrocketed and were well above what was actually used. Every year after that, the requests got lower and lower, but were still higher than the actual funds used.

Second, it cannot be argued that front line states were hogging diplomatic security resources because Obama Admin created a whole new budget category for them which was more than 3X larger than the DoD budget items that they replaced.

 

democraps better drop that one before someone asks:
What budget?

 

PT tell Pee Drinker that there is presently over $2 Billion sitting in the account for Embassy security. Obama won't release any of it.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/polit...itting-on-billionplus-for-embassy-138402.html

 

I would but ,filtcher has me on ignore.

 

Whining about security budgets is about what I expect from these guys. When have they ever accepted responsibility for anything? Except for killing OBL of course.

If the budget is stretched, you prioritize. Paris and Vienna have to make due without those Volts. You allocate resources to the greatest threats.

If you lack the resources to protect people, the only moral policy is to withdraw them. What vital interest was a freaking consulate in Benghazi fulfilling anyway? Lot of student visas getting issued there? Lot of tourists coming through?

The thing that Buchanan didn't mention is that this attack went on for literally hours, yet we never responded. We have an air base in Italy that is probably 30 minutes away for an F16. One strafing run by a flight of F16's and that attack is over. Yet they did nothing. probably worried about upsetting the Libyans. Or maybe Obama was too busy at a fundraiser or partying with some rappers to be bothered.