You might also like to read this Timeline from USA Today.
Key elements of the timeline:
April to June:
July
Note that the initial attacks in Libya pre-date the video.
Sept 8 - Three days before the attack
Sept. 10
So, AFTER there are already attacks on American assets in Libya, and AFTER a battalion commander had already determined the situation there as ‘frightening’, another major threat from al-Qaida is directed specifically at Americans in Libya.
Then the attack happens, four Americans are dead, and the administration almost instantly blames a video and mob violence for the attack. They either knew better and lied, or they are incompetent. I lean towards ‘lied’, because:
Sept 12:
Okay, so by Sept 12, everyone knows this was a terrorist attack, and who did it.
Sept 13:
Sept. 14:
Sept 16:
So by now, it’s been four days since everyone in the government knows that this was a terror attack. Yet Susan Rice is sent around to the Sunday talk shows to claim that it was NOT a terrorist attack, and that it was random violence caused by a movie trailer on Youtube.
Sept 18
Now you can see how he phrased this. He obviously knows it was a terror attack, so he didn’t come right out and say ‘no’. Instead, he continued the narrative that an anti-Muslim video is to blame while dodging the question.
You can read the rest yourself. It’s pretty clear to me that the administration was lying its ass off hoping to convince everyone that there was nothing to see here other than Muslims responding to a video. No al-Qaida threat, nothing that you could possibly blame on the Obama administration’s policies. It wasn’t until officials were forced to testify under oath that the truth started coming out.
And even so, by Sept 25 Obama was STILL using the video in his speech to the United Nations and elsewhere as the reason for all the Muslim violence, despite the fact that the al-Qaida flag was also raised on the U.S. embassy in Cairo.
You cited the Guardian article in reference to the House testimony, or at least so it appears. Are all your other definitive and authoritative statements derived from the same source as well?
Try to focus. Consulates in cities other than the capitals don’t have Marine detachments except in certain rare cases. The US Embassy in Libya is in Tripoli, the capital, and has an MSG detachment to cover the posts there. The consulate in Benghazi does not. The Vienna embassy (I’ve been there and worked there) is HUGE. The MSG detachment there has to cover a lot of posts, but THEY DON’T PROVIDE PERSONAL PROTECTION FOR THE AMBASSADOR unless the embassy is under attack. In places like Vienna, where the consulate is in the same city but in a different building, there is usually one Marine on duty. If the shit hits the fan over there while the ambassador is visiting, he’s SOL. In countries where the consulate is in a different city, no MSG detail is provided, but rather local military/police forces are expected to take up the slack.
The embassy in Cairo is enormous, and the MSG detail is very large. Even so, when I was there, two of the RSOs, with a CIA guy in the car, were ambushed on the way to work. All the Marines in the city couldn’t have prevented it. Was that Ronald Reagan’s fault? For that matter, were the events of 9/11 GWB’s fault?
The attack occured from approximately 10 PM - 2 AM in Benghazi time - i.e., 5 PM - 9 PM Washington time. At 12:30 AM Washington time, it would have been 7:30 AM Benghazi time, well after the attack was over.
So the answer is “not very”.
Overall, I see people on the right trying to take simple mistakes that can be chalked up to fog of war and trying to drum a “coverup” out of it. It was a reasonable assumption that the events in Benghazi and the events that were occurring outside embassies in 18 other countries were connected.
The confusion is that the attack happened in two waves. There was the attack on the consulate, which began about 9:40 PM. At some point, the surviving security personnel (the ambassador was nowhere to be found) got in a truck and headed for a security annex 2km away. This was sometime in the middle of the night. They ran into groups of heavily armed men along the way, and what looks like intentional roadblocks coming out the area. The enemy combatants had AKs and hand grenades, but the agents were in an armored truck. They got around the roadblock and made it to the security annex. At about 4 AM, the annex came under mortar fire, killing two Americans.
So the annex takes mortar fire at 4 AM, and the whole incident continues for several hours after that until they are evacuated. So this doesn’t fit your 10 PM to 2 AM timeline. Events were still unfolding probably until the middle of the night Washington time.
That said… I tried to dig up a proper cite for this, and I’m pissed off. At myself. This is one of those ‘facts’ that is all over the right-wing web sites, including supposed cites. I tried following them back to their sources, but links generally lead to other web sites, which then repeat the story with a ‘source’ link to another web site.
I finally got to the what looks like the original source - a video from Fox News special report. That was annoying enough, but I watched the report, and it seemed very objective - and said nothing about Obama going to bed after hearing the report. It just said that Obama was first notified 90 minutes after the attack began, which you rightly point out started at about 9:40 PM Libyan time. So Obama would have been notified around dinner time - not at 12:30 in the morning. The bit about him going to bed looks like editorial content injected into the transcript of the actual cite by a blogger. I read the written account, but didn’t watch the actual video. Now that I have, I see that it was bullshit.
So… I retract that point completely, with my apologies for helping to ‘chain letter’ a falsehood. I should have checked better in that case, but it’s been repeated so often and so widely that I let my guard down. Mea culpa.
I don`t know who is culpable here - that’s what the hearings are for. You don’t think Libya just might be a special case, considering the circumstances? And the previous requests for more security?
In any event, I started out my comments by saying that it’s not necessarily the security or lack thereof that’s got the administration in trouble here - it’s the fact that they lied their asses off for a week afterwards to try to hide the fact that al-Qaida killed four Americans, destroyed a consulate, and forced the entire operation to shut down and leave the country.
The latest revelations show that the State Department was following the attack in real time, and knew right from the start that it was a terrorist attack. And yet, the Secretary of State was still pushing the ‘mob violence due to a video’ line several days later, and five days after the attack UN Ambassador Susan Rice was sent out by the administration to all the Sunday talk shows to claim that it wasn’t terrorism, but instead random mob violence.
That’s the real scandal here. The lack of good security may turn out to be a scandal as well, but that’s still working its way through the hearing process. We’ll have to wait and see. But it seems highly likely that the Obama administration sought to intentionally deceive the American people as to the nature of the attack in Benghazi. As usual, the cover-up is often more damaging than the crime.
I guess there is also the possibility that the administration is in disarray, lines of communication are broken, the State Department isn’t cooperating with the White House, and therefore what we’ve seen was just chaos and confusion from a dysfunctional administration.
Very generous of you, Sam, spoken like a Canadian! A pity you have no point of comparison, some other administration operating under poor intelligence and making very bad decisions with disastrous consequence. Just for comparison’s sake, you understand, get some perspective. Probably have to go back to Buchanan…
Quote: That is what we saw play out the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well – for as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and religion. We are home to Muslims who worship across our country. We not only respect the freedom of religion – we havelawsthatprotect individualsfrom being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. Weunderstand why people takeoffenseto thisvideo becausemillions of our citizens are among them.
Last edited by magellan01; Yesterday at 03:39 PM.
So this quote couldn’t have related to the protests that had taken place? Where’s the reference to the Benghazi attack? I’ve seen this speech applied to the timeline elsewhere, but it doesn’t really fit.
As to your other point, there was a CIA memo found by AP dated after the date you’ve claimed all intelligence knew it was a terror attack pointing to the video as causation.
“Five days after the attack, citing the best information she had at the time, United Nations ambassador Susan Rice tied the violence to the video protests, in line with a CIA memo that said the Benghazi crowds “were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” and “evolved into a direct assault” on the diplomats.”
And of course you had another intelligence office claim the same thing here.
" Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office on Friday tried to explain the shifting public explanations for who was behind the deadly Sept. 11 attack on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya. DNI public affairs director Shawn Turner said U.S. intelligence concluded “in the immediate aftermath” of the assault that it had begun “spontaneously” in the wake of violent protests in Egypt."
“We provided that initial assessment to Executive Branch officials and members of Congress, who used that information to discuss the attack publicly and provide updates as they became available,” Turner said. “As we learned more … we revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists.”
The statement could take some of the heat off the White House over some of its early explanations for what happened in Benghazi, which claimed the lives of American Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three colleagues. White House press secretary Jay Carney, noting that an FBI investigation was ongoing, repeatedly tied the attack to public anger at an Internet video that insults Islam.
How does the one follow from the other? Youtube’s community guidelines state: “we do not permit hate speech (speech which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status and sexual orientation/gender identity).”.
The issue isn’t the attack, it’s the lying about it. They lied about the cause of the attack, and they lied about whether or not more security was requested. And they continue to lie, most notably Joe Biden at the debate, which forced the press secretary to split hairs in a rather embarrassing way(the administration knew about it, just not the President or VP. Someone might want to clue them in.)
What has been happening is that the administration has been focused like a laser beam on making sure nothing that can harm the reelection campaign gets out. That’s why they issued WARN guidance to defense contractors, it’s why they delayed Medicare Advantage cuts, and it’s why they needed the Benghazi attack to not be terrorism.
This time they got busted in a way that the media feels compelled to report on it and continue asking pesky questions about who knew what and when. THe media will be happy to bury a story that’s unfavorable to an administration they like. What they won’t put up with is being lied to themselves.
I don’t understand this. What “political cost” could there be to providing resources for defense of a consulate? Sam Stone used this passage to prove that the state department was “playing politics” with the security of the consulate, but it’s hard to understand exactly what that is supposed to mean, or what is supposed to be bad about it, unless we understand just what “political cost” is being referred to here.
If the problem is just that the administration was dishonest about the nature of the event when talking about it in public, well, that doesn’t seem like a real problem to me. It’s par for the course for administrations to lie about international events in their public discourse, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes for diplomatic reasons. It doesn’t even particuarly bother me that they do this. There are often good reasons for them to lie–and of course often good reasons for us to be suspicious of their account. So goes the world…
People are saying that this scandal could end up to be as huge as Solyndragate. I know people are saying that because Fox News told me that people are saying that. And that is undeniable, because *they *are saying that, and they are clearly people.
But one point still troubles me. Why would it be to Obama’s advantage if the attack were characterized as a popular uprising rather than a terrorist attack by a group that does not have the sympathy and support of the Libyan people in general? Seems to me that the opposite would be true, that the Admin would be far better served by a “terrorist minority/fanatics” spin than anything else.
Perhaps you can explain that to me, so that I don’t have to tune into “Fox and Friends” to get the real story.
Because a spontaneous uprising is unpredictable. A terrorist attack, especially given the previous attacks on the consulate, exposes that the administration was negligent. It’s right up there with the memo Bush got in August 2001.
There’s also the fact that Obama is so focused on campaigning and messaging that he didn’t want anything to spoil the narrative. He’s gone to a lot of trouble to shape conditions to make them ideal for his reelection and let things fall apart, if they will, shortly after.
BTW, I left out the private urging of EU officials to delay Greek’s exit from the Euro until after the election.
Because the Boosh didn’t spend weeks lying his ass off about 9/11, whereas the Obama administration spent weeks lying and changing their stories regarding Benghazi. Stephanie Cutter alone gave four different stories. It took the White House nearly a month to admit that there were no protests in front of the embassy, or that the attack was preplanned (whereas they spent an inordinate amount of time claiming it was a spontaneous attack in response to that video). And now you’ve got the White House and the State Department pointing fingers at each other, with neither one being able to get their facts straights. That’s why.
It should be a big deal to anyone who isn’t a blind partisan.