The Truth About Benghazi and Obama

The Truth About Benghazi and Obama

They knew from the beginning it had nothing to do with a YouTube video.

by
Roger Kimball
Bio

January 14, 2014 - 10:16 am

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Remember “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi,” the elaborate, round-about piece of Hillary-for-President boosterism by David Kirkpatrick in our former paper of record at the end of December? The take away of that fantasy was that the attack in Benghazi had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. It was not a terrorist attack, but a spontaneous uprising on September 11, 2012 (September 11, Kemo Sabe), the unfortunate but perfectly understandable response to a 13-minute movie trailer that made fun of a medieval religious figure called Mohammed. Right. Did anyone believe it? I doubt it. It was just many thousands of words of protective coloration. A travesty of journalism, yes, but more or less what anyone with a scintilla of indenpendence has come to expect from The New York Times. 

The response to the piece was swift and vigorous. And now we have unimpeachable documentary proof about Kirkpatrick’s mendacity:

Minutes after the American consulate in Benghazi came under assault on Sept. 11, 2012, the nation’s top civilian and uniformed defense officials — headed for a previously scheduled Oval Office session with President Obama — were informed that the event was a “terrorist attack,” declassified documents show. The new evidence raises the question of why the top military men, one of whom was a member of the president’s Cabinet, allowed him and other senior Obama administration officials to press a false narrative of the Benghazi attacks for two weeks afterward.

And more:

[General Carter] Ham’s declassified testimony further underscores that Obama’s earliest briefing on Benghazi was solely to the effect that the incident was a terrorist attack, and raises once again the question of how the narrative about the offensive video, and a demonstration that never occurred, took root within the White House as the explanation for Benghazi.

If this doesn’t do it for Obama, and for Hillary, could anything?
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Cross-posted from Roger’s Rules