RUTHFULLY YOURS

We now know that these murders were not the result of some spontaneous demonstration run amok in response to a video critical of Islam’s founder, Mohammed. Rather, they were the result of a carefully planned and well-executed military operation conducted by jihadists associated with al Qaeda.

It turns out the Obama administration knew at least the broad outlines of that reality within hours of the attack.

So why did assorted administration officials tell us otherwise for days afterwards? For example, long after there was reason to believe a jihadist military attack killed the four Americans in Benghazi, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the President himself insisted that it was just unpremeditated, disorganized violence which was precipitated by an amateur filmmaker in California.

Fortunately, that preposterous party line has now become untenable, thanks to a series of statements – both on and off the record – by counterterrorism and intelligence officials and congressional sources disputing Team Obama’s original, dissembling accounts.

The administration is clearly furious that it is being exposed in the run-up to the President’s reelection as having deliberately and knowingly disinformed the American people, so it is now trying to shunt the blame onto the intelligence community.

The new line is that the Obama administration didn’t mislead the American people. Rather, we are told it was given bum dope by its intelligence agencies. Specifically, the President’s flaks want us to believe that, because some in the intelligence community were unable – or at least unwilling – to say early on exactly which jihadist group was responsible, the administration was on solid ground in saying there were none involved. This is, of course, no more tenable than the previous lie.

So why would the Obama administration engage in such dissembling – both the original deception and the effort to cover it up?

There seem to be three factors at work.

First, Team Obama is frantically trying to obscure the utter failure of the President’s reckless engagement with and investment in the Muslim Brotherhood, its various fronts in this country, and other Islamists.

The calculation seems to be that, if the administration can deflect attention from the fact that such jihadists have predictably begun to institute totalitarian shariah rule and otherwise destabilize the Middle East, Mr. Obama can dodge a potentially lethal political bullet – at least until after the critical presidential election on November 6th.

Second, Team Obama seems to have calculated that, by insisting a video was responsible for the attack – and not its own fecklessness and submissiveness that have greatly emboldened our enemies – it can protect and actually advance an agenda it has been developing together with the Islamists.

In fact, ever since it came to office, the Obama administration has sought to accommodate Islamist demands that freedom of expression be curbed, lest it offend Muslims and stoke violence.

For example, in 2009, it co-sponsored a UN Human Rights Council resolution along those lines. In 2011, it launched the so-called “Istanbul Process” to find common ground with proponents of shariah blasphemy laws who seek to strip us of our First Amendment freedoms.

And in September 2012, President Obama announced at the United Nations: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” – a stance indistinguishable from that of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, and al Qaeda.

In practice, the administration’s insistence on avoiding offense to Muslims – and, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it, “old-fashioned shaming and peer-pressure” on those who do so – has had the inevitable effect: self-censorship is now being widely practiced in America.

Ironically, this appears to be the case, for example, with Hollywood filmmakers now fearful of releasing a flattering movie they had made with help from Team Obama about the President’s role in killing Osama bin Laden.

All other things being equal, further shariah-commanded erosions in our constitutional freedom of speech seem inevitable.

Third, the Obama administration’s Libya debacle and subsequent cover-up demand the sort of investigations that five Members of Congress – Representatives Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, Trent Franks, Lynn Westmoreland and Tom Rooney – asked for back in June. They formally requested that five federal agencies’ inspectors general examine the extent to which individuals with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood who are, nonetheless, serving in various official capacities may be influencing U.S. government policies. Of particular concern is the extent to which those policies are coming ever more into alignment with the Islamists’ agenda.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s penetration of the Obama administration was put into even sharper relief after the Libya attacks when a prominent – and highly controversial – figure in the Islamist infrastructure in America, Salam al-Marayati president of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muslim Public Affairs Council, was made an official U.S. representative at an international human rights conference in October in Warsaw. In response to well-founded criticism about Marayati’s long record of anti-semitism, support for terrorist groups and ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the State Department spokeswoman actually defended him as “valued and highly credible.”

We need the truth – about what happened in Libya, about the subsequent cover-up, about the Obama administration’s acquiescence to shariah blasphemy laws and, not least, about the influence Islamists “inside the wire” are exercising in all these areas and more – to the grave detriment of our constitutional rights and security.