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BREAKING: Jay Carney Lied About the Benghazi Talking Points

Posted By Ruth King on May 10th, 2013

BREAKING: Jay Carney Lied About the Benghazi Talking Points

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Breaking this morning, from ABC News’ Jonathan Karl:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.  The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community.  They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012.  “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Here’s the kicker: “In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?  Concerned . . .”

Hey, why would they want to accurately inform the public if it might result in criticism from Congress, right?

The Middle East, Suddenly Armed to the Teeth with ‘Game Changer’ Missiles

Perhaps the Middle East will be quiet in the coming days, but if it isn’t . . . well, maybe this is a factor:

The chief of Hezbollah has said the the Lebanese Shia armed group is ready to receive “game-changing” weapons from Syria, just days after Israeli air strikes on Damascus reportedly targeted shipments of advanced Iranian weapons bound for the group.

Hassan Nasrallah, in a speech on Thursday, said the shipments of new types of weapons would serve as the Syrian reaction to Israel’s air strikes.

“The resistance [against Israel] is prepared to accept any sophisticated weaponry even if it was to break the equilibrium [in the region],” he said in a speech.

Okay, first, the phrase “game-changer” is long overdue for retirement. John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, I blame you.

Apparently this is the hot phrase all over the Middle East:

Israel launched air strikes on targets in Damascus early on Sunday morning that shook the city and lit up the horizon.

Western and Israeli sources said its aim was to take out “game-changing” Iranian missiles destined for Hezbollah, which fought a war with Israel in 2006 and is a staunch ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Meanwhile, as Secretary of State John Kerry attempts to keep the Syrian bloodbath from spreading any further, the Russians are tweaking him, letting slip that they’re shipping new arms to Syria, right after he asked them to help calm things down:

Secretary of State John Kerry today stood by his renewed push with the Russian government for the Assad regime and Syria’s opposition to negotiate a political solution to end the conflict, now going into it’s third year.

Speaking at a news conference in Rome, Kerry addressed a Wall Street Journal report on Thursday that Russia was preparing to sell missiles to the Syrian government, saying he expressed his general disapproval of Russian support to the Assad regime during his meetings with President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier this week.

“We’ve made it crystal clear that we would prefer Russians not supply assistance. That is on record. That hasn’t changed,” said Kerry, who added that the United States believes the shipment of missiles would be “potentially destabilizing with the respect to the state of Israel.”

But he also acknowledged that there are countries supplying weapons to the rebels, and stressed that he wants to focus on what the United States and Russia can accomplish towards helping both sides reach a political solution soon.

He said he remained encouraged by the Russians’ cooperation and by what he described as a public backing-away from their specific support for Assad.

I feel actually pretty good that John Kerry is our secretary of state. Oh, I don’t think he’ll thrive in the job; in fact, I think he’ll fall flat on his face. But he’s wanted to do this job for so long, and been so certain that he knew how to play this role perfectly, that it’s fun to see him run headlong into reality.

Anyway, about those missiles:

“It would be a game-changer,” a senior Western diplomat said of the reported decision to offer the missiles to Assad. The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because details of the reported offer remain classified, speculated that Moscow could be seeking leverage ahead of talks on a possible political settlement to the Syrian crisis.

You would almost think the “Game Changer” was a particular type of missile, wouldn’t you?

Russia was heavily criticized in 2007 when it signed a deal to sell S-300 batteries to Iran for $800 million. Russian officials eventually terminated the contract, citing new U.N. resolutions banning the export of advanced missile systems to Tehran.

“After discussions with us, they did decide not to provide the missiles to the Iranians,” recalled Dennis Ross, who was a senior Middle East adviser to the Obama administration in 2010, when Russia halted the missile sale to Iran. “If they proceed now, it hardly signals that they are prepared to walk away from Assad.”

I just envision Kerry in his office, hitting the “reset button” over and over again, like an impatient man at an elevator.

An Argument You Might Expect, from a Voice You Probably Didn’t

Raise your hand if you foresaw David Frum lodging this complaint about the current immigration-reform effort:

Unless you posit that the newly legalized immigrants will dramatically outperform the existing immigrant population, you will reach a result very like that of the Heritage Foundation: that the taxes paid by the newly legalized will not begin to equal the costs of their Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other benefits. . . .

Let me put this in boldface: Heritage’s cost estimates are driven not primarily by welfare, but by healthcare. Every newly legalized immigrant, no matter how ambitious and hard-working, will get old. When he or she gets old, he or she will qualify for Medicare. Medicare is very, very expensive, and getting more expensive all the time. Fewer and fewer Americans — whatever their ethnic origin — pay enough in taxes to cover their predicted future health care costs. Inevitably, Medicare is becoming a more redistributionist program. People on the left get this point when they scoff at the imputed Tea Party slogan, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Why do they forget the point when they speak of immigration?

Ace:

Those who claim that bringing in a lot of low-skilled, low-income workers into our social safety net will actually pour money into the safety net have to answer one question: In what country, anywhere, are the poorest citizens net-payers into the government’s fisc?

It’s ludicrous. It is no knock on poor people — no slight to their humanity — to note the obvious fact that the poorer a person is, the less he pays into the government (lower taxes, if any at all) and the more he takes out of it (needing more frequent use of welfare, foodstamps, unemployment insurance, and, of course, Medicare and ObamaCare).

You are either stupid or lying if you claim that adding 20 million fairly poor people into our social safety net is actually a net fiscal winner for the US taxpayer and treasury.

Maybe this version of immigration reform is the compassionate thing to do, or the morally right thing to do, or the politically necessary thing to do. But it is just about impossible to argue that it is the cost-effective choice for a country that has a lot of worsening fiscal problems looming just over the horizon.

Common Worries About the Dwindling Sense of Common Good

Yesterday’s point about the sense of the common good waning in the face of public idiocy and irresponsibility seemed to hit a nerve.

Here’s a Campaign Spot reader who tried to help out, and found himself growing cynical:

For several years I worked in inner-city church ministry. I assisted minority families, helped their children with homework, watched kids while parents went to the hospital, took their children trick-or-treating, attended their kids’ high school football games, etc. I’m not giving myself a pat on the back — I genuinely loved the work. I worked mostly with teens and pre-teens. Working with adults would require the slightest amount of commitment on their behalf, a commitment zero percent of them were willing to give (unless, of course, we offered a free meal).

I know it’s anecdotal, but two incidents stand out in my mind as turning points. One was the week before Thanksgiving. I worked hard to collect food for needy families so they could enjoy a nice Thanksgiving meal. I gathered all the groceries and headed downtown to a home that was in disrepair. The roof was caving in, the foundation was cracked, it hadn’t been painted in who knows how long. A typical inner-city home. When I walked inside there’s five young ladies, three of them pregnant. They’ve got a 72 inch plasma on the wall and they would hardly look up form their brand-spanking new iPhones to tell me where to put the groceries. When they directed me to the kitchen, there were several other Thanksgiving packages other churches had sent. I couldn’t believe it. I left the groceries on their porch — I figured the least they could do was carry the groceries in themselves.

A second story, I’ll be more brief. Whenever a young lady in our ministry would get pregnant (usually around 15 or 16), she’d be lauded as a hero. The other girls saw pregnancy not only as an excuse to get out of high school permanently, but the government checks start rolling in. And they actually say that to each other, “When you gonna start collecting?” And the more babies they make, the more money they get. Who knew baby-making was a source of revenue? They do, apparently.

One observation: dysfunction begets dysfunction. A young person surrounded by adults who make bad decisions is likely to make more bad decisions.

Drew M. grew irritated with Pete Wehner, feeling that his post blurred the lines between private efforts to help the less fortunate and government-based efforts: “Conservatives are very much involved in Burke’s ‘little platoons.’ On the whole however we are not interested in signing up for a crusading army of government mandated and funded ‘obligations and attachments.’ To conflate the two is the kind of cheap rhetoric one would expect from the statists.”

ADDENDUM: Heh. Thursday night, a guy at a bar in Dallas asked Kristina Ribali if she knew about this group called FreedomWorks; they helped get Ted Cruz elected.

Ribali, of course, is the Director of New Media at FreedomWorks.

NRO Digest — May 10, 2013

Today on National Review Online . . .

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