Obama's little lie

Either this will go Romney's way or Americans could care a toss about what happens outside America.

Pants On Fire: Obama Scrambles For Cover As Benghazi Lie Explodes

Forbes,

14 October, 2012

The carefully coordinated and heavily armed September 11th strike upon the American Consulate in Libya contradicted President Obama’s repeated narrative that, thanks to his tough policies and actions, al-Qaeda has been defeated. And although misrepresented by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice as a “spontaneous outbreak” of violence provoked by a “hateful” movie denigrating Muslim prophet Muhammad, he and other high members of his administration knew full well and early on that this was patently untrue. Congressional testimony reveals that the White House had been informed on day one that al-Qaeda terrorists were responsible for the murders of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi.

For more than a week after the Benghazi attack, the Obama administration which pledged to be the “most transparent administration in history”, continued to maintain a ruse that the outbreak of violence was nothing more than a spur-of-the-moment protest in response to the offensive video. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeated the fiction, and White House press spokesman Jay Carney told us all that there was “no evidence” that this was a “preplanned or premeditated attack.”

An October 2nd CNN report disagreed. It revealed that the administration repeatedly sent out talking points that contradicted top intelligence officials and sources for the network on the details of what caused the attack. It also said that: “CNN has learned tonight that the White House chose to leave out key intelligence from the attacks on Americans in Libya. There are three things U.S. intelligence has now confirmed to be true: the attacks were preplanned, terrorist attacks, and the work of Al-Qaeda- linked groups. None of these three points were in talking points distributed to congress and other government officials. U.S. intelligence knew of the al-Qaeda link within 24 hours of the attacks. And the now infamous comments by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice that the attacks were not preplanned and not the work of terror came four days after that. This doesn’t add up.”

In addition to absolutely no evidence that the attack was connected to any objectionable video, information released in a letter from Representative Darrell Issa to Secretary of State Clinton shows that the situation in Libya had been deteriorating for months. It reads: “Based on information provided to the committee by individuals with direct knowledge of events in Libya, the attack that claimed the ambassador’s life was the latest in a long line of attacks on Western diplomats and officials in Libya in the months leading up to September 11, 2012.”

Those attacks began in April when two Libyans threw an improvised explosive device into the consulate compound. In June, postings on a pro-Gaddafi Facebook page encouraged Libyans to attack Ambassador Stevens during one of his early morning runs around Tripoli. And in the weeks leading up to September 11th, Libyan guards were being warned by their family members to quit their consulate jobs because of rumors about an impending attack. These are but a few of the escalating series of incidents. There were also carjackings, shoot-outs, and even a rocket-propelled grenade being shot at a convoy carrying the British ambassador.

It is now evident that al-Qaeda hit four, not just one, embassies last month, with none of the other three ever attributable to a video either. The Weekly Standard reports that in addition to the American Consulate in Libya, terrorists tied to the same group that attacked our homeland on 9/11 were also behind U.S. Embassy sieges in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen. All were timed around the 9/11 anniversary.

One of the most ironic and inexcusable aspects of the fatal Benghazi tragedy is that Ambassador Stevens, who after recognizing and communicating the special 9/11 security threat, was denied protection he requested. Yet remarkably, Vice President Joe Biden claimed during last Thursday’s debate that the administration was unaware of security requests. This seemingly contradicted evidence presented to the Congressional Oversight and Government Reform Committee just a day earlier. Biden said “We weren’t told they wanted more security, we did not know they wanted more security.” But if so, why wouldn’t the president, vice president and secretary of state have been be briefed?

During the debate, Representative Paul Ryan accused the Obama administration of having an “unraveling” foreign policy, pointing particularly to “the larger failures of the administration to be completely transparent about the terrorist attacks in Benghazi and the security situations leading up to the attacks.” He rhetorically asked Biden, “This was Libya…a country we knew had al-Qaeda cells. And we did not give our ambassador in Benghazi a marine detachment?”

The congressional committee was presented with a diplomatic cable sent by Stevens to the state department in Washington on August 2nd asking for an additional 11 security personnel to be added to the rotation of 24. Though the 11 were to replace temporary security staff, Stevens had made it clear that violence and terrorism were a threat amid a volatile political landscape. He wrote: “Due to the level of threat in regards to crime, political violence and terrorism, post feels this is an appropriate number of LES [locally employed staff] security personnel needed to further embassy diplomatic outreach missions. Violent security incidents continue to take place due to the lack of a coherent national Libyan security force and the strength of local militias and large numbers of armed groups.” He further emphasized that “Host national security support is lacking and cannot be depended on to provide a safe and secure environment.”

Two former U.S. security chiefs in Libya who testified before the committee also reported that they had found it impossible to get the message across back home that security was a critical problem. Andrew Wood, former head of a U.S. military team in Libya, told the committee that “…the security in Benghazi was a struggle and remained a struggle throughout my time there”. He added that the head of U.S. security in the region had pushed for more people “…but was never able to attain the numbers he felt comfortable with.”

Eric Nordstrom, the former security chief for U.S. diplomats in Libya, observed that he had been fighting a losing battle over numbers in which “ …we couldn’t even keep what we had.” He finally concluded after his contact with state department bosses that “…we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident”.

There are only two possibilities that can explain this senseless debacle. Either it reflects gross incompetence and irresponsibility on the part of the president and many others who answer to him, or it also represents this along with an egregious disinformation campaign aimed at concealing foreign policy failures to diminish known terrorist threats under his watch. Some additional events occurring during his term in office give credence to the latter scenario.

For example, we might recall the Fort Hood, Texas massacre when Major Nidal Hasan screaming “Allahu Akbar” opened fire on a room full of Army soldiers on November 5, 2009 was dismissed by Obama as a random act of “one individual”. It was formally classified by his administration as a case of “workplace violence” rather than a terrorist act.

And we might remember that, just days after of the 2009 Christmas day attack on a U.S. airliner, the president assured our nation that the so-called underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was “an isolated extremist”. Yet within the first hours of the investigation, Obama and his national security team had known, as Abdulumutallab told the FBI under interrogation, that he had been trained by al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Plus, consider that shortly after Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate his explosives-packed SUV in downtown New York on May 1, 2010, the White House described it as a “one-off” incident, confidently indicating that it wasn’t part of a planned series. Yet intelligence clearly showed that Shahzad had been trained at a Taliban camp inside Pakistan, and was funded by a terrorist group.

Finally, carefully contemplate what Obama said in his speech before the Democratic National Convention: “My opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy. But from all that we’ve seen and heard they want to take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost America so deeply.”

Is it possible that the past blustering and blundering he referred to is really his own, and that we might truly be ready for new foreign policy leadership after all?