The thing that baffles me is that the Republicans think anyone should care. Even if the Obama administration lied, fudged the truth, or misled about the attack to make for a smoother election, so fucking what?
“But it’s a bad thing if the President lies about anything!” No, it really isn’t. You see, there are degrees of lying. Even if the admin lied to sway the election, it doesn’t compare at all to lying about aluminum tubes or WMDs. Those lies, you see, actually killed thousands of people.
Newsflash, Benghazi nuts- if this is the best you’ve got, you’re pretty damn screwed.
I’ve already said that this is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, and that the Republicans shouldn’t put it front and center in the elections.
But I think it’s appropriate to try and find out the truth. What did he know, and when did he know it? Just because it’s not the worst lie ever told doesn’t mean it should be ignored.
The bolded part is patently false and attempts to ignore basic sentence construction and logic as well as the factual order of Mr. Obama’s remarks.
His reference to Benghazi comes after the mention of 9/11, showing that thePresident has shifted to the attacks of the previous day. Thus the phrase “acts of terror” clearly and obviously refers to not just 9/11/01 but also the events of 9/11/12. Any other interpretation cannot be reasonably supported.
If anyone can come up with a plausible motive that the administration might have to lie - other than to avoid clueing in the terrorists about the course of the investigation - I might agree with you.
Why? Even if the allegations are true, would *anything *have played out differently? I contend that it should be ignored- because the cost of the investigations is already into the millions. There should be a point at which scandal-mining becomes too expensive.
When should we stop investigations of presidential administrations lying and doing cover ups? After a certain dollar amount has been spent? What amount? Only if something would “play out differently”, whatever that means?
Do you think that administrations should be able to lie freely without being investigated? Do you think this even of Republican administrations?
I don’t think anything should come of this, except some shame for the administration and a loss of confidence from the public because of the events and the cover up. I’m not saying we should impeach him or anything. If the administration was honest from the beginning this would already be forgotten. If you’re upset about the spending on the investigation I would argue that’s the fault of the administration, not those seeking to investigate.
[QUOTE=Lamar Mundane]
A spontaneous protest and a planned attack are not mutually exclusive.
[/QUOTE]
“Opposites” and “mutually exclusive” don’t mean the same thing. Those two terms are opposites, but they are not mutually exclusive, because both can happen at the same time in the same place.
In fact, that’s precisely what earlier reports believed happened: the terrorists used the cover of a protest to launch their attack. They’d planned the ‘how’ but not the ‘when’; a spontaneous protest similar to that in Cairo gave them the ‘when.’
In fact, a version of that seems to be still very much in play: bad guys had surveilled and planned the attack, but used the video to whip up the fighters and get lots of other people to spontaneously join the assault and looting. That equals a planned attack and spontaneous fury at the same time and same place, hence NOT mutually exclusive.
Do you know what the term “mutually exclusive” means? From your last two posts on the subject it is pretty clear that you do not. It does not mean the same thing as opposite. You are aware of that aren’t you?
So it’s a bad thing is the Obama administration “lied” about the attack to score political points… but somehow *not *a bad thing if the GOP spends millions of dollars to do the same?
Again, even if the GOP’s allegations prove to be true, nothing will change. Those people would still have died. The only difference is the Obama administration will look (marginally) bad. Is it worth the millions of taxpayer dollars that have already been spent?
If the truth is so important, what about the events which lead us to war? Should we be continually investigating what Bush did or didn’t know, on the off-chance that he knew he was lying? Because compared to that, Benghazi is a blip.
This is silly. Every attack has some spontaneous elements to it. Using this absurd definition you could state that every attack in the history of warfare is spontaneous.
Early reports from the administration. Reports that have turned out to not be correct, since there wasn’t a demonstration in Benghazi like there was at Cairo.
Do you have a cite that anyone used the video to get people to spontaneously join in the fighting? People did loot after the attack. I’m sure this was spontaneous. But to say that the attack was a spontaneous riot rather than a planned attack is simply false. You need to really twist the meanings of words to the point of absurdity to make this case.
I’ve never argued that Bush shouldn’t be investigated about something because I wanted to save money. Not that I can recall anyway. Do you have an example of me doing this, or did you just make this up?
This came from Al Jazeera’s reporter in Benghazi, Suleiman El-Dressi. That same article reported on a British think-tank’s assertion that it was a planned attack, but then went on talk about the movie and the attack in Cairo.
Yes, actually, I do have cites. Some of them have already been given in this thread, but in case you missed it, see e.g. the AP’s coverage:
Yeah. The attack in Benghazi and the riot/protest in Cairo.
:rolleyes:
I’m sure some random people looted afterwards. Maybe some people spontaneously picked up guns and joined in the attack (we haven’t seen a cite for this yet, but it’s possible.)
But a few unplanned things in an organized attack don’t stop it from being an organized attack. This was a couple hundred people who planned and showed up with heavy weapons and vehicles. They made an organized attack. It wasn’t a riot or protest that spontaneously got violent. Attempts like that NYTimes article (which we’ve only seen a paragraph of, with no link to the whole article for context) to paint this as spontaneous because of small details like that just serves to provide an excuse to the administration’s spin.
Debaser, can you summarize the current state of our knowledge on the extent of planning that went into the attack? Because as far as I’ve seen, we *still *don’t know anything about it being planned (much less, on 9/16/12), except insofar as an attack by “heavily armed extremists” may ipso facto reflect a degree of planning–in which case the attack being “planned” was implicit in Susan Rice’s calling it an attack by heavily armed extremists as opposed to an attack by spontaneous protesters.
Hey Debaser, welcome to the club of people here who absolutely refuse to give any creedence to any quote whatsoever that even slightly suggests that the video may have played a role in the attack. Why can you not acknoweldge that these reports were made by the various media organizations because of evidence they had at the time?