Ed Morrissey
Hot Air
1/15/2014
The bombshell here isn’t the blame — it’s that the blame is bipartisan. Normally in these circumstances, a Congressional committee looking into the activities of a current administration will split into partisan conclusions, especially if it’s critical at all. Not this time:
A long-delayed Senate intelligence committee report released on Wednesday spreads blame among the State Department and intelligence agencies for not preventing attacks on two outposts in Libya that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
The bipartisan report lays out more than a dozen findings regarding the assaults on Sept. 11 and 12, 2012 on the diplomatic compound and a CIA annex in the Libyan city of Benghazi. It says the State Department failed to increase security at the sites despite warnings, and faults intelligence agencies for not sharing information about the existence of the CIA outpost with the U.S. military.
The committee determined that the U.S. military command in Africa didn’t know about the CIA annex and didn’t have the resources to defend the diplomatic compound in an emergency.
“The attacks were preventable, based on extensive intelligence reporting on the terrorist activity in Libya—to include prior threats and attacks against Western targets—and given the known security shortfalls at the U.S. Mission,” the panel said in a statement…
…[Libya] was a failed state, made obvious by the string of terrorist attacks in the city. One attack blew a hole in the American compound three months before that final assault. While State kept refusing more security resources, other Western nations and even the Red Cross packed up and left Benghazi that year. All the while, as General Carter Ham testified, the Pentagon didn’t do anything to improve readiness to respond in that region even with the knowledge that al-Qaeda affiliates operated openly in eastern Libya and Benghazi, and the anniversary of 9/11 was just around the corner.
Let’s put this together…
Read the entire article at HotAir.com
Related: Consistency: Obama lied *before* #Benghazi, too
…this was all showboating to preserve the narrative that al Qaeda was on the run and to protect the President’s reelection campaign. That “order” quoted above is the kind of grandstanding one would expect from a cheap pol — which is what Obama is.The proof is in his administration’s deeds, not its words, and, in the run up to September 11th, 2012, with regard to Benghazi, his administration’s deeds show Barack Obama did nothing.
Except lie to the American people about it.
Just to draw a line under the point that the administration had ample warning that trouble was brewing in Benghazi, but chose to ignore their duty, let me quote another section that relates the testimony of Marine Colonel George Bristol…
…Rosen’s report confirms what the failure to act on these warnings implied: Barack Obama really couldn’t care less about doing his job.
American Blood, US Consulate, Benghazi
Read the whole thing.
Rubio Challenges Hillary and Obama over Benghazi Failures
From November 2013:
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At YouTube, Disillusioned wrote:
Despite evidence showing the Benghazi attack was staged by a State Department hired jihadist security outfit in connection with an arms transfer to al-Qaeda mercenaries in Syria, the establishment media is pretending it does not know what happened in Libya on September 11, 2012.
The corporate media has yet to point out that the Obama administration attempted to cover-up the real reason for the murder of ambassador Stevens — U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the State Department initially pointing to a lame anti-Muslim video — and has consistently downplayed the incident and characterized it as a non-event not requiring congressional investigation and the impeachment of President Obama.
Covert War Between the Pentagon and CIA
A number of people came forward following the attack have built an indisputable case that the CIA was shipping arms from U.S.-controlled facilities located at the U.S. mission in Benghazi to its mercenaries in Syria and the murder of ambassador Stevens was carried out by an al-Qaeda affiliated group as part of a turf war between the CIA and elements in the Pentagon.
“The real issue is very simple, you have to think of two elements of the government fighting each other that are covert,” Pieczenik said. “The government is never unified, it never has been unified. For over thirty or forty years there has been a conflict between the military and the CIA and the FBI… The CIA has been run for the last fifty years by civilians who are out of control.”
Update:
VIDEOS — Before and After: Watch Jay Carney Spin on Benghazi http://t.co/VfRIjAgkpA #tcot
— PJ Media (@PJMedia_com) January 15, 2014
Lieberman: Benghazi ‘Obviously a Terrorist Attack by Any Definition of Terrorism’
Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) told a House committee this morning that the Obama administration’s rush to blame the Benghazi attack on an anti-Muhammad video underscored the White House’s narrow definition of Islamic terrorism.
“It was obviously a terrorist attack by any generally held definition of terrorism,” Lieberman said at the House Homeland Security Committee, which was examining the administration’s “false narrative” that al-Qaeda is on the run.
“They obviously weren’t just there to have a good time,” he said of the terrorists gathered outside the U.S. diplomatic facility, and “even if it was somehow affected by the video, still it was terrorism.”…
