FAILINGS OF BAM AND HILL LAID BARE
By John Podhoretz at NY Post
After a remarkable House hearing yesterday, we can say this with almost complete certainty: The Obama administration knew perfectly well that last year’s Sept. 11 attack on Americans and American facilities in Benghazi was a terrorist act — yet chose to characterize it falsely as a spontaneous response to an anti-Islam YouTube video.
We can say this because we learned during the hearing that on Sept. 12, State Department official Beth Jones said flatly in an e-mail, “The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.”
We can say this because we heard the testimony of the No. 2 US diplomat in Libya, Greg Hicks — in which he said no one on the ground in Libya had any doubt it was a planned assault by Ansar al-Sharia. The first thing his boss, Ambassador Chris Stevens, told Hicks over the phone was, “We’re under attack.” Stevens was murdered shortly thereafter.
We can say this because we learned last week that the State Department Operations Center sent out a bulletin on Sept. 11 stating that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility.
Hicks said that in his conversations with State Department officials back home, including Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, neither he nor they nor anybody else said anything about a spontaneous demonstration or anything about a YouTube video.
So Team Obama knew. But Team Obama also knew there had been protests in Egypt around the embassy there that had been staged in response to the YouTube video. And at some point in the days that followed, the administration decided to conflate the two events and assign blame for the attack in Benghazi on the video.
It sent out UN Ambassador Susan Rice on Sept. 16 to say, as she did on CBS’s Sunday chat show, “Our assessment as of the present is . . . what began spontaneously in Benghazi [was] a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo.”
We don’t know why the Obama administration chose to do this. We can speculate. We can guess it did so because it had developed a story line for the 2012 election in which al Qaeda was dead, and this muddied that story line.
But there’s a very good counter-argument that, politically, Obama missed an opportunity: He could have gotten up and said, “I’m the man who got bin Laden, and we’ll get these men, too.” That would’ve rallied the country. Who would’ve objected? Who would’ve criticized?
The point is, all we will have is speculation until someone on the inside gives up the goods in a memoir, if anyone ever does.
Is this an impeachable offense? No. Will Hillary Clinton’s evident involvement in the revision of the administration’s line on Benghazi harm her presidential chances in 2016? No.
Will this be of great political utility to Republicans? No. Will this harm Democrats terribly? No — even though Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings did say, “Death is a part of life,” in response to the fact that four Americans were slaughtered by terrorists.
So what’s the big deal?
We can say it’s a big deal because of the testimony of Eric Nordstrom, the regional security officer in Libya at the time of the attacks. “It matters to me personally and it matters to my colleagues at the Department of State,” Nordstrom said as his voice cracked with sorrow and he paused several times to choke back tears. “It matters to the American public for whom we serve and, most importantly, it matters to the friends and family of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, who were murdered on Sept. 11.”
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/nationa...NvmfD7eACUM4BJ
BENGHAZI HEARINGS SUMMARY : A THREAD JOHNNY CASH WOULD SUPPORT !
