Who Should Be Held Accountable for the Benghazi Cover-Up?
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee Peter King called last week for the resignation of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. King said that Rice should resign for misleading the American public during a succession of Sunday television news show interviews about what led to the Sept. 11th murders of Ambassador John Christopher Stevens and three other Americans during an assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. She said that it was a spontaneous mob outburst that got out of control in reaction to the anti-Muslim video, rather than the premeditated Islamic jihadist attack that it actually was.
“I believe that this was such a failure of foreign policy messag[ing] and leadership, such a misstatement of facts as was known at the time … for her to go on all of those shows and in effect be our spokesman for the world and be misinforming the American people and our allies and countries around the world, to me, somebody has to pay the price for this,” King told CNN.
King is wrong to scapegoat Rice. She was simply taking her cue from President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who shamelessly blamed the video for the violence in order to divert attention away from their abysmal failure to secure the consulate against a predictable Islamist jihadist assault on Americans on the anniversary of 9/11.
By having Rice appear on several Sunday talk shows with her disingenuous explanation, the Obama administration put her out on a limb to be cut off later if necessary and save the higher-ups from accountability.
Ambassador Rice is part of the State Department headed by Hillary Clinton. Does anyone seriously doubt that Rice’s public statements on an issue as delicate as the violence in Libya and Egypt would not have been vetted first by more senior Obama administration officials, if not by Hillary herself?
Ambassador Stevens also worked for the State Department. In excerpts from his diary released by CNN, Stevens expressed concern for his own safety because he believed he was on al Qaeda’s hit list for assassination. What was Hillary’s State Department’s response to this information when it was made public? Her senior advisor Philippe Reines blasted CNN for doing its journalistic duty.
Asked about the warnings of a possible hit list, Clinton said, ”I have absolutely no information or reason to believe that there’s any basis for that.”
“The office of the director of National Intelligence has said we have no actionable intelligence that an attack on our post in Benghazi was planned or imminent,” Clinton also said, calling the security measures in place there “robust.”
The first head to roll should be Hillary Clinton’s, not her subordinates. Hillary is highly experienced in cover-ups from her days as First Lady during her husband’s administration. She appears to be putting that experience to work today in keeping the public from learning the complete truth as to why the State Department did not do more to protect Ambassador Stevens and other U.S. personnel.
The next to go should be Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, whose spokesperson issued a statement on Clapper’s behalf on September 28th claiming that American intelligence agencies “revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists.”
What new information? The Libyan government said from the outset that the video had nothing to do with the Benghazi attack but rather was a pre-meditated terrorist attack. According to informed sources quoted by Fox News, our intelligence agencies knew within a day that al Qaeda affiliates were behind the attack. Is Clapper’s claim of “new information” a lie to cover up what the Obama administration really knew early on as opposed to its back-and-forth public explanations, or are our intelligence agencies just incredibly incompetent in ignoring the obvious? Either way, it is time for Clapper, who said last year that the Muslim Brotherhood was a “largely secular” organization, to join Clinton out the door.
However, Clinton and Clapper’s resignations are not enough. The buck stops with President Obama, who refuses to answer to the American people for his gross dereliction of duty as the commander-in-chief. During his speech last week to the United Nations General Assembly, he continued to blame the video for the violence, even though administration officials had already begun to distance themselves from that lame excuse. Obama called the video “crude and disgusting” in the speech and an “insult not only to Muslims, but to America.”
The president disgracefully continues making his false claims on the campaign trail that al Qaeda is on the road to defeat. To the contrary, al Qaeda’s contagion has spread from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen to Libya, Syria, Mali, Nigeria and other parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Obama has continued to treat the recent spurt of Muslim violence as, in his words, just another unfortunate “bump in the road on the path to democracy.” He is desperately hanging on to the fiction that Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood ruling Egypt, can be trusted as champions of true democracies simply because they claim to reject al Qaeda’s violent tactics. Acting on this fiction, the administration announced on Friday that it intends to provide an emergency cash infusion of $450 million to the Muslim Brotherhood-led Egyptian government, which failed to protect the American embassy in Cairo from a violent attack on 9/11. This is in addition to military aid of more than a billion dollars.
Page: 1 2
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment