DEROY MURDOCK: A MONSTROUS COVER-UP
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/347919/monstrous-cover
‘There is no video that justifies an attack on an embassy,” the President of the United States told the United Nations last September 25, one of six “video” references in his speech. A fortnight after the deadly attack on America’s mission in Benghazi, Obama was still insisting that Innocence of Muslims, an obscure, anti-Islamic YouTube video, had fueled the mayhem. Presumably, a spontaneous protest spun out of control and unleashed lethal violence.
But, as he addressed the General Assembly, Obama surely knew that it was an al-Qaeda–propelled assault, not a YouTube video, that had killed U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.
As Wednesday’s sworn testimony by three State Department whistleblowers demonstrated, this was just one of many lies deployed by Obama and others high atop the U.S. government. These lies nurtured the myth that “al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat,” as Obama claimed at a Las Vegas campaign rally the evening after the Benghazi onslaught. With the truth kept conveniently obscured up to November 6 and beyond, Obama won reelection as the man who supposedly killed both Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. In fact, only the former is dead.
The truth behind this monstrous cover-up finally is emerging, too late to defeat Obama at the polls, but perhaps in time to speed his early return to Chicago.
In gripping testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, these top diplomats broke their silence and shattered Team Obama’s carefully crafted post-Benghazi narrative.
From the very start of this episode, U.S. officials called it an attack, rather than a video-driven protest.
“Greg, we are under attack,” Ambassador Stevens said in his last words to Deputy Chief of Mission Greg Hicks, just before Stevens’s cell phone clicked off on the night of September 11.
The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes reports that two hours into the onslaught, at 6:08 p.m. Eastern Time, a State Department Operations Center alert, in Hayes’s words, “indicated that Ansar al Sharia, an al Qaeda–linked terrorist group operating in Libya, had claimed credit for the attack.”
In a newly revealed September 12 e-mail to State Department staffers, Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Elizabeth Jones recalls consulting Libya’s ambassador in Washington. Jones wrote: “I told him that the group that conducted the attacks, Ansar Al Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.”
“The YouTube video was a non-event in Libya,” Hicks testified under oath Wednesday. “The only report that our mission made through every channel was that there had been an attack on our consulate. . . . No protest.”
The father of the late Tyrone Woods says that, as his son’s remains were officially welcomed home on September 14, then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton approached him. She promised that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula — the Los Angeles–based, Egyptian-born Coptic Christian behind the anti-Islamic video – would be “prosecuted and arrested.” Never mind that producing anti-Islamic videos is not illegal, for now. (Nakoula remains in jail, nonetheless, for probation violations tied to unrelated crimes.)
In the May 13 Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes carefully documents how Team Obama sanitized the CIA’s initial talking points to erase al-Qaeda’s fingerprints on this attack and, instead, make it look like a demonstration gone crazy. A September 14 version of this document stated, “We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qa’ida participated in the attack. . . . Ansar al Sharia’s Facebook page aims to spread Sharia in Libya and emphasizes the need for jihad to counter what it views as false interpretations of Islam.”
By the time the State Department and the White House had whitewashed these talking points, a third version, on September 15, explained: “There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.” Were these extremist Muslims? Extremist vegetarians? Extremist Rotarians? The scrubbed document does not say.
If the records he cites are accurate, Hayes writes, “It is clear that senior administration officials engaged in a wholesale rewriting of intelligence assessments about Benghazi in order to mislead the public.”
The next day, United Nations ambassador Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday-morning talk shows. Relying on the doctored talking points, she told Fox News’s Chris Wallace: “What sparked the violence was a very hateful video on the Internet.” Rice added, “It was a reaction to a video that had nothing to do with the United States.”
“I was stunned,” Hicks testified, concerning Rice’s TV appearances. “My jaw dropped, and I was embarrassed.” He added that Rice never spoke with him before doing her interviews, even though — after Ambassador Stevens’s assassination — Hicks had become America’s top diplomat in Libya.
The State Department’s Administrative Review Board was supposed to discover the truth about Benghazi. However, it now is being investigated by State’s inspector general to determine whether it adopted a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach. The ARB never interviewed Hillary Clinton about her role in this disaster. Whistleblower Mark Thompson, a top State Department counterterrorism official, testified Wednesday that he had volunteered to speak with the ARB but was ignored.
Team Obama has hindered Representative Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) as he has tried to solve the Benghazi puzzle. “The first week of October, I did go to Libya,” Chaffetz told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity Wednesday night. “I did meet with Mr. Hicks. And we heard testimony that Mr. Hicks was coached ahead of time not to allow me to speak to three individuals there, including Mr. Hicks. The State Department had sent along a babysitter, a minder, to listen and take notes of everything I did.” Chaffetz continued: “The idea that a member of Congress trying to seek out the truth, and they are being told not to allow that member of Congress to have an individual conversation — I mean, that’s pretty stunning.”
Hicks testified that State Department officials ordered that “we were not to be personally interviewed by Congressman Chaffetz.” He added that Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Miller, called after he met with Chaffetz. “She was very upset with me,” Hicks said. “She delivered a blistering critique of my management style.”
Hicks also ran afoul of State’s aforementioned Elizabeth Jones. “I asked her why the ambassador [Rice] said there was a demonstration when the embassy reported there was an attack,” Hicks explained. “The sense I got is that I needed to stop my line of questioning.”
Hicks also testified that “I’ve been effectively demoted from deputy chief of mission to desk officer” — perhaps because he has failed to toe the Obama line.
In addition to the three whistleblowers who came forward this week, 30 more Benghazi witnesses remain hidden and reportedly afraid to speak up. As American citizens, they should not have fear in their vocabulary.
So, why this abundance of lies and obstruction?
An al-Qaeda–affiliated terror group targeted an American diplomatic facility and killed four American public servants, including Washington’s first ambassador to be murdered on duty since 1979. These facts completely undermined the myth that al-Qaeda had been in retreat since SEAL Team Six liquidated Osama bin Laden in May 2011. So, Team Obama buried these inconvenient truths beneath a sand dune of lies.
Since Obama’s Justice Department cannot be trusted to investigate itself, House Speaker John Boehner should assign a select committee to probe Benghazi, subpoena and immunize the 30 remaining survivors of the attack, and invite the sworn public statements of those who can detail what may be the biggest federal cover-up since Watergate.
The American people — not least the families of Messrs. Stevens, Smith, Doherty, and Woods — deserve to know who perpetrated this fraud, no matter how far the mighty may fall.
— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.
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