President Obama took responsibility last week for his administration’s actions in Benghazi, Libya. He insisted those criticizing U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Susan Rice for misleading the American people regarding the terror
attack ought to come after him instead. This week, administration
leakers are passing the buck.
Unnamed sources within the administration say that someone in the Office of Director of National IntelligenceJames R. Clapper removed references to “al Qaeda” and “terrorism” from Mrs. Rice’s talking points, with CIA and FBI concurrence. According to this version of events, Mr. Obama, his national security staff and the State Department
had nothing to do with it. The reason, they say, is the evidence of
terrorism was considered too tenuous to be released. CBS News
correspondent Margaret Brennan reported “there was not strong confidence in the person providing the intelligence” about links to al Qaeda.
Numerous
unclassified reports in hours and days after the assault gave a clear
picture of exactly what happened, and the links to terrorism were
obvious. The attack was a planned, violently executed and anything but
spontaneous. The U.S. government
had all the tools at its disposal to verify this in short order,
including real-time communications intercepts, on-the-scene drone
surveillance video, interviews with members of Libyan intelligence
agencies and analysis of terror group activity before, during and after
the attack. To say the entire U.S. intelligence community was only able
to base its assessment of a critical incident on a single,
less-than-reliable human source is laughable. Even if the specific al Qaeda connection was tenuous, it’s nearly impossible to conclude it wasn’t a terrorist plot.
In congressional testimony Friday, former CIA
Director David H. Petraeus revealed the intelligence community was
immediately aware terrorists were behind the assault, which is as one
would expect. Democratic lawmakers emerged from the closed-door hearing
explaining that the specific references to terrorism were excised
because the administration did not want to tip off al Qaeda that the United States was on their trail. So one story is that the talking points were sanitized because the government knew too much, while other apologists said the memos were dumbed down because the government knew too little.
Neither
of these contradictory explanations sheds light on the origin of the
false narrative that the Benghazi incident was a spontaneous riot over a
low-budget YouTube
video. There has never been any evidence of such a demonstration or mob
scene outside the Benghazi consulate prior to the attack. Drone
surveillance video, which Mr. Obama and other high-ranking
administration officials have access to, would have quickly eliminated
this possibility. The YouTube
story was invented out of whole cloth, yet was considered so important
that secretary of State Hillary Clinton bizarrely vowed vengeance on the
filmmaker to the parents of the slain, rather than on the people
actually responsible for the murders.
Questions about the source of the YouTube
excuse aren’t going to go away. Mr. Obama ought to demonstrate
responsibility by coming clean with a full account of his
administration’s response to the Benghazi tragedy.
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