Presidential Honesty and the Benghazi Scandal

  

On September 11, 2012, the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked by terrorists linked to Al Qaeda. US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. After the attack, the black flag of Al Qaeda was raised over the compound.

Prior to the attack, the President’s re-election campaign had boasted of his foreign policy accomplishments by pointing to the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and the purported claim that Al Qaeda had been decimated and was no longer a threat to the US.  Thus the idea that we were far safer than when Obama took office was thought to immunize the President against any charges of failure in his conduct of foreign policy

However, long before the attack, Al Qaeda had shown increasing strength, as it took over the northern parts of Mali, establishing a sanctuary similar to what it once had in Afghanistan.  

Further, Bruce Reidel, formerly a Middle East analyst in the CIA and a member of President Clinton's National Security Council, wrote last July that what was happening in Libya and across the Middle East was a comeback for al-Qaeda.

Further, In Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood had joined forces with al-Qaeda and its affiliates to overthrow the former leader, Muammar Gaddafi. (Obama sided with the anti- Gaddafi forces, thus helping both Al Qaeda and Islamist fundamentalists)

To preserve the fiction that terrorism was waning under Obama, it became critical to the campaign to deny that groups tied to terrorism might have been involved in the Benghazi attack. Such an admission would undermine the administration’s re-election prospects.

Conveniently, an amateurish video poking ridicule at the Prophet Mohammed had been made by an American, and was being met with anger throughout the Arab Middle East. It was not a big step to try to tie the Benghazi attack to this phenomenon, taking the pressure off the idea that terrorists might be responsible.  And so an obscure, barely watched video, received enormous publicity thanks to President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and others.

 So for a period of two weeks after the attack, a parade of Obama administration personnel, including the President, claimed repeatedly that the attack was the result of an anti-Muslim video that insulted the Prophet, and refused to blame terrorists for the attack.

However, other information was rapidly accumulating. According to Dore Gold, within hours of the attack, “U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted communications between members of Ansar al-Sharia, the main Libyan militia behind the operation, and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”

Further, the Associated Press, claimed that they were told by US officials that the CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington within 24 hours of the attack that there was evidence that the attack was carried out by militants, and not a spontaneous mob upset about the video ridiculing Mohammed.

There were other problems, with related questions about lax security at the Libyan compound, as well as indications that requests for improving security had been refused by the administration, and that Ambassador Stevens had feared for his safety.

This will play an important role in the election on Nov 6. Jennifer Rubin has stated that “The Obama administration’s shifting accounts of the fatal attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, have left President Obama suddenly exposed on national security and foreign policy, a field where he had enjoyed a seemingly unassailable advantage over Mitt Romney in the presidential race.”

Despite accumulated clear evidence to the contrary, the President and his colleagues clung to the video explanation. On five Sunday talk shows on Sept 16, 5 days after the attack, UN Ambassador Susan Rice claimed that the attack and the deaths of four Americans in Libya was a result of a spontaneous demonstration against the anti-Muslim video. She further claimed that the lethal attack in Benghazi was preceded by peaceful protests.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Ambassador Rice said:

“It began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo, where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video.... We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned".

Then there was the Vice-Presidential debate.  According to Andrew McCarthy, the Vice-President was totally dishonest.  At the beginning of the debate when Biden was asked about the fact that the administration had claimed that reaction to the anti-Muslim video, and not terrorism, had generated the violence, he claimed that Obama was simply relying on the intelligence information he was given, and stated unequivocally that the intelligence community told the administration that there were protesters (even thought the intelligence community knew within a day that it was not due to the video.)

While this claim was outrageous, Biden was unable to be straight about many related matters. He denied that the administration refused to provide adequate security for the diplomats in Benghazi. Our diplomats in Libya knew that they were in danger. They communicated their fears to Washington, pleading for additional protection. Yet Biden denied this. “We weren’t told they wanted more security again. We did not know they wanted more security again.”

On Sept 20, President Obama appeared on Univision where he referred to the anti-Muslim video. He said,  “What we’ve seen over the last week, week and a half, is something that actually we've seen in the past, where there is an offensive video or cartoon directed at the prophet Muhammad”

On Sept 25, President Obama appeared on ABC’s “The View” Here was the exchange:

QUESTION:  “I heard Hillary Clinton say it was an act of terrorism. Is it? What do you say?”

OBAMA: “We are still doing an investigation”.

And again, on Sept 25, 14 days after the attack, President Obama addressed the UN and attributed the attack to the video, shamelessly advancing the same excuse.  “That is what we saw play out in the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world.  Now, I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video”

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney finally stated that the terrorism conclusion was ‘self-evident’ after he had spent the previous eight days describing a very different account.

Not everyone got it wrong. The State Department claimed that no one in the department ever believed that the attack was the result of the video. How could this be? As Jennifer Rubin points out, the State Department got it right, but the President did not?

The search for an explanation different from a terrorist attack is natural for an administration that wishes to continue to claim success in defeating al-Qaeda. Further, it seems likely that Obama expected to prevail.

Could this all be the result of massive incompetence, related to inept advisors, and to a disengaged but arrogant President who thinks himself too knowledgeable to attend national security briefings?  Here is what former Obama advisor Rosa Brooks has to say:

“He was a visionary candidate, but as president, he has presided over an exceptionally dysfunctional and un-visionary national security architecture — one that appears to drift from crisis to crisis, with little ability to look beyond the next few weeks. His national security staff is squabbling and demoralized, and though senior White House officials are good at making policy announcements, mechanisms to actually implement policies are sadly inadequate.”

Or could it be a result of poor skill and judgment? After all, this is a President who refuses to use the work jihadists, who believes Al Qaeda is finished, and who thinks that he can charm the Iranian mullahs into giving up their nuclear ambitions.

It is a cliché that the cover up is always worse than the underlying crime. This has been seen over and over, the best example being Nixon and Watergate. And to blame the attack on the video was a means of covering up the failure to eliminate terrorism as a threat to the US.

However, Watergate was different in at least two ways. First, no one died. And secondly, there was one, and only one cover up. In this case, it became more complicated, as there was an attempt to cover-up the cover-up.

Faced with the charge that he had failed to label the attacks terrorism, Obama tired to back up and now claim that in fact, he had called them terrorist attacks within one day of the event.  In the Town Hall debate, the President claimed that he had called the attack a terror attack on Sept 12, the day after the assault.

However, by claiming that he knew it was an act of terror the next day, he is attempting to cover up the first cover up.  This creates a new problem for the President. If he knew this to be the case within one day, how does he account for the two weeks in which so many, including himself, blamed the attacks on the video?

If he figured out in one day that this was a planned terrorist attack, why was Jay Carney sent out on Sept. 14 to insist it was all about an anti-Muslim video? Why did U.N. Ambassador Rice go on five Sunday talk shows tying the murder of four Americans to a protest growing out of a video? Why did the president dwell on the anti-Muslim video in his Sept. 20 Univision appearance, and again at the United Nations on Sept 25?  Declaring that the president knew on Sept. 12 that he was dealing with terrorism means that he and many others were subsequently engaging in serious mendacity.

And so we have two conflicting possibilities, both claimed by the President.

One possibility is that President Obama, as he claimed in the Town Hall debate, knew and clearly stated that the attack in Libya was in fact a terror attack on Sept 12, one day after the event.

The other possibility is that the entire apparatus of the administration, Joseph Biden, Jay Carney, Susan Rice, and President Obama himself continued to refer to the attack, not as an attack by terrorists, but rather as a response to a video.

These cannot both be true. So the President has been caught deliberately misleading the American people.

The scandal involves Presidential dishonesty. It also involves a failure to protect our diplomatic personnel, and the failure to attend to intelligence warnings. Congressional committees are demanding to know what the intelligence agencies knew and when they knew it.

This is a serious problem.  Foreign policy does not usually play a major role in an election, but in this one, one that is both very close and highly contentious, this scandal might be all it takes to reject the current President. 

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