James Rosen, fresh from being surveilled by the most transparent Administration ever, breaks the news last evening, citing newly declassified documents, among which was the transcript of Gen Ham, then head of AFRICOM, who was all but disappeared after the incident:
Minutes after the American consulate in Benghazi came under assault on Sept. 11, 2012, the nation’s top civilian and uniformed defense officials — headed for a previously scheduled Oval Office session with President Obama — were informed that the event was a “terrorist attack,” declassified documents show. The new evidence raises the question of why the top military men, one of whom was a member of the president’s Cabinet, allowed him and other senior Obama administration officials to press a false narrative of the Benghazi attacks for two weeks afterward.
Gen. Carter Ham, who at the time was head of AFRICOM, the Defense Department combatant command with jurisdiction over Libya, told the House in classified testimony last year that it was him who broke the news about the unfolding situation in Benghazi to then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The tense briefing — in which it was already known that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens had been targeted and had gone missing — occurred just before the two senior officials departed the Pentagon for their session with the commander in chief.
According to declassified testimony obtained by Fox News, Ham — who was working out of his Pentagon office on the afternoon of Sept. 11 — said he learned about the assault on the consulate compound within 15 minutes of its commencement, at 9:42 p.m. Libya time, through a call he received from the AFRICOM Command Center.
“My first call was to General Dempsey, General Dempsey’s office, to say, ‘Hey, I am headed down the hall. I need to see him right away,'” Ham told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation on June 26 of last year. “I told him what I knew. We immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary Panetta.”
Ham’s account of that fateful day was included in some 450 pages of testimony given by senior Pentagon officials in classified, closed-door hearings conducted last year by the Armed Services subcommittee. The testimony, given under “Top Secret” clearance and only declassified this month, presents a rare glimpse into how information during a crisis travels at the top echelons of America’s national security apparatus, all the way up to the president.
Also among those whose secret testimony was declassified was Dempsey, the first person Ham briefed about Benghazi. Ham told lawmakers he considered it a fortuitous “happenstance” that he was able to rope Dempsey and Panetta into one meeting, so that, as Ham put it, “they had the basic information as they headed across for the meeting at the White House.” Ham also told lawmakers he met with Panetta and Dempsey when they returned from their 30-minute session with President Obama on Sept. 11.
Armed Services Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., sitting in on the subcommittee’s hearing with Ham last June, reserved for himself an especially sensitive line of questioning: namely, whether senior Obama administration officials, in the very earliest stages of their knowledge of Benghazi, had any reason to believe that the assault grew spontaneously out of a demonstration over an anti-Islam video produced in America.
Numerous aides to the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly told the public in the weeks following the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans that night — as Obama’s hotly contested bid for re-election was entering its final stretch — that there was no evidence the killings were the result of a premeditated terrorist attack, but rather were the result of a protest gone awry. Subsequent disclosures exposed the falsity of that narrative, and the Obama administration ultimately acknowledged that its early statements on Benghazi were untrue.
“In your discussions with General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta,” McKeon asked, “was there any mention of a demonstration or was all discussion about an attack?” Ham initially testified that there was some “peripheral” discussion of this subject, but added “at that initial meeting, we knew that a U.S. facility had been attacked and was under attack, and we knew at that point that we had two individuals, Ambassador Stevens and Mr. [Sean] Smith, unaccounted for.”
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, a first-term lawmaker with experience as an Iraq war veteran and Army reserve officer, pressed Ham further on the point, prodding the 29-year Army veteran to admit that “the nature of the conversation” he had with Panetta and Dempsey was that “this was a terrorist attack.”
The transcript reads as follows:
WENSTRUP: “As a military person, I am concerned that someone in the military would be advising that this was a demonstration. I would hope that our military leadership would be advising that this was a terrorist attack.”
HAM: “Again, sir, I think, you know, there was some preliminary discussion about, you know, maybe there was a demonstration. But I think at the command, I personally and I think the command very quickly got to the point that this was not a demonstration, this was a terrorist attack.”
WENSTRUP: “And you would have advised as such if asked. Would that be correct?”
HAM: “Well, and with General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta, that is the nature of the conversation we had, yes, sir.”
Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February of last year that it was him who informed the president that “there was an apparent attack going on in Benghazi.” “Secretary Panetta, do you believe that unequivocally at that time we knew that this was a terrorist attack?” asked Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. “There was no question in my mind that this was a terrorist attack,” Panetta replied.
Senior State Department officials who were in direct, real-time contact with the Americans under assault in Benghazi have also made clear they, too, knew immediately — from surveillance video and eyewitness accounts — that the incident was a terrorist attack. After providing the first substantive “tick-tock” of the events in Benghazi, during a background briefing conducted on the evening of Oct. 9, 2012, a reporter asked two top aides to then-Secretary Clinton: “What in all of these events that you’ve described led officials to believe for the first several days that this was prompted by protests against the video?”
“That is a question that you would have to ask others,” replied one of the senior officials. “That was not our conclusion.”
Ham’s declassified testimony further underscores that Obama’s earliest briefing on Benghazi was solely to the effect that the incident was a terrorist attack, and raises once again the question of how the narrative about the offensive video, and a demonstration that never occurred, took root within the White House as the explanation for Benghazi.
Rosen, who probably doesn’t want his parents further harassed, is speaking in class open-ended journalistic speak — “raises once again the question” is a kind of deferential rhetorical nicety, and also a way for Rosen to protect himself from making outright assertions; but I don’t have the same concerns, my current run-ins with the IRS notwithstanding, so I’m free to put it this way: Ham’s testimony makes it clear that both Panetta and Gen Dempsey knew that the consulate was undergoing a terror attack. What they did with that information is still unknown, largely, because we don’t know what Obama knew or when he knew it, itself the product of an activist, progressive media content to run interference for the man who went to bed, either left standing orders for no rescue incursion or deferred that power to someone like Valerie Jarrett, and then spent the next day doing a fundraiser with Beyonce while the narrative creating a short-term plausible scapegoat was concocted.
The Administration, from Clinton to Panetta to Jarrett to Obama (if it can be said he’s even briefed at all anymore: he may just be shoved out in front of cameras and told to read leftist boilerplate for the “cause”), it is now clear, was concerned about the political implications of a terrorist attack during an election season in which Obama’s trumpeting of his foreign policy positions included the assertion that Al Qaeda (and by extension, its various affiliated groups) was decimated and on the run.
And so the decision was made somewhere to protect the President, protect the would-be next President, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and get through the election, after which, should the Democrats win, they could count on a complicit press, a lockstep Dem coalition of lawmakers, and a timid, feckless, teary orange clown heading up the House, to sweep the entire situation under the rug, likely for national security reasons that redound to the real nature of the CIA’s involvement (which I suspect had to do with recovering weapons).
In short, the decision was made — consciously, intentionally, and with no respect to those who perished, t0 the American people, and for the truth itself — to create a narrative they knew the leftwing media and new media shriekers would get behind and defend, as ridiculous as it was.
But to further give that concocted narrative teeth, a man was publicly arrested, thrown into jail, and left there for months under the pretense of a parole violation — in what has to be one of the most frightening instances of what a partisan, all-too-powerful government run by self-serving cretins is capable of. When it comes time to choose between the innocent and the guilty, they will protect the guilty, provided the guilty is on the “correct” side of the political equation, and the guilt can be rationalized as serving some greater good. Like, for instance, making sure Obama was re-elected so that fundamental transformation good proceed apace, and the socialist / liberal fascist society of rulers and ruled could be solidified and codified through various edicts, court decisions, imperial dictates, and the like.
As with the IRS scandal, the GOP establishment — rather than be seen as charging Obama with malfeasance — has never really sought to find answers. Or rather, they’ve rationalized (or been convinced) that the answers might compromise some ongoing programs in the region.
But the fact is, Americans died, and we, the People, were lied to — with one of us scapegoated and imprisoned as a way to protect an Administration and its secrets.
If you believe in the idea of the primacy of the individual in this society of representative government, this should outrage you. If you don’t? Well, then know what it is you are: one of those who would have pleaded “I was just following orders” at a different era in time. Godwin’s stupid law of the internet be damned.
If you’re truly willing to goose step like Nazis in order to serve a Big Lie, then you are what you are, and fuck you if you don’t like being told so.
The single argument we will hear from every orange-skinned pragmatist leading up to 2016 will be “Would you rather have Cankles in office?”
You know what? The DC GOP is only too happy to be her handmaiden.
ClownDisaster looked askance at a Benghazi Box-In, no doubt: *** Mullen and I repeatedly discussed with the infuriated president what he regarded as military pressure on him. “Is it a lack of respect for me?” Obama asked us. “Are [Petraeus, McChrystal and Mullen] trying to box me in? I’ve tried to create an environment where all points of view can be expressed and have a robust debate. I’m prepared to devote any amount of time to it—however many hours or days. What is wrong? Is it the process? Are they suspicious of my politics? Do they resent that I never served in the military? Do they think because I’m young that I don’t see what they’re doing?” ***
The guy who made the YouTube video should sue for civil rights violations and get the attorneys with the biggest mouths they can get. I mean, someone who would get Gloria Allred to say, “Jeez, dude, does it always have to be about you?”
But unfortunately, most of that type are already elected…
I’ve tried to create an environment where all points of view can be expressed and have a robust debate.
*insert laugh track*
I think this crosses the line to High Crimes and Misdemeanors, not to mention Impeachment.
I don’t care that impeachment “won’t happen”. So what? Tie his hands with having to defend every pos extra-constitutional decision he has made since he took office, including influence peddling with the media.
Saying anything true about the ClownDisasterSecOState is right out of bounds, no matter where the speaker lives — what’s that called again, muzzling?
L. L. Duce could hand tactical missiles to the Taliban as he leaves Afghanistan and the GOP still wouldn’t dream of writing up Articles of Impeachment.
Someone needs to make a 2016 ad that shows Hillary blaming a youtube video while standing in front of the coffins at their Andrews AFB memorial service.
In a sane world her career would have been over shortly after this (hiving resigned in disgraces for leaving her own ambassador and other unprotected for 7+ hours. I just don’t understand how this big lie has been maintained for so long.
James Rosen doesn’t know the reflexive use of personal pronouns?
Simple, Libby. The administration does not fear the media, the loyal opposition, the courts or the people.
I’ve tried to create an environment where all points of view can be expressed and have a robust debate
“I won”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/17862.html
If Hillary and Obama continue to get away with this then I guess I’ll have to start praying for some sort of divine intervention, like Hillary having a stroke or brain tumor. She seems to be like Ted Kennedy, though, and no amount of bad living or soullessness seems to slow her stride.
I’m not as good at quoting scripture as some here, but as far as divine intervention, what first comes to mind is, “God helps those who help themselves.”
Heck, that’s probably not even biblical, more like Ben Franklin.
Unfortunately, Red, the closest that comes to religious citation is from the Quran (13:11):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helps_those_who_help_themselves
Allah blows up those who blow up themselves?
Confidential to Eric B.:
You never call, you never write. Certain people have been worried about you.
“I think this crosses the line to High Crimes and Misdemeanors, not to mention Impeachment.”
An interesting thing, leigh: most people (including myself up until recently) think that “High Crimes” [insert Choom joke] refers to actions subject to the legal standard.
But I read an article (sorry, can’t cite) stating that the founders intended impeachment (and subsequent removal) to be a political solution, not a legal one. A president could be removed for, say, violating even the spirit of the Constitution.
In that sense, it is just a slightly more formalized version of ostracism as practiced by the ancient Greeks.
I though he was L. L. Douche.
The quote from Aesop/the Greeks/Ben Franklin is almost antithetical to the teachings of Scripture, which generally support the idea of God helping the helpless. For matters of belief versus action, I’ll go with James 2: “What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?”
It is not enough to pray for intervention and hope for everything to sort itself out; that’s the easy way out. Better to pray for the strength to do what needs to be done, and the perseverance to see things through to the end. Better to pray for the wisdom to see the righteous path, and the compelling dignity to convince your neighbors to join you on that path.
In a manner of speaking…
If Hillary and Obama continue to get away with this then I guess I’ll have to start praying for some sort of divine intervention, like Hillary having a stroke or brain tumor.
Do yourself a favour, and have a look over at the WaPo, NYT, a quick peek at the network TV. What did you see regarding Gen. Ham’s testimony?
Exactly. Continue to get away with this?
mattse001, that’s interesting. Thanks. I had an idea that it wasn’t the actual law breaking that was referred to, but the spirit of lawlessness. I’m not a lawyer or a politician and I rely on y’all to keep me up to speed.
Back when Nixon was the anti-Christ (according to the newspapers and news anchors), I don’t recall him doing anything as appalling as the Wahn has done and with such regularity. Of course, I was about 14 years old then, so I may be misremembering.
But, SW: the traffic jam! The horror!
I’m thinking of printing some shirts: “I Survived teh GWB Lane Closure”.
I’ve sat through less contrived French farces, leigh.
Federalist 65: *** A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt. ***
This seems to confirm that.
An example would be failing to uphold the Presidential Oath of Office, which the author lists as an example of the original definition of perjury: to violate an oath.
It would be hard to imagine a government that would hold a politician to his oath.
So long ago, this was. Ages.
I was watching The Merchant of Venice the other day and noted when Shylock said, “I swore an oath!” I remembered how important oaths were in our culture for so long. Now we have irony and postmodernism. Lucky us.
I’ll have to start praying for some sort of divine intervention, like Hillary having a stroke or brain tumor.
Oh, you can be more ambitious than THAT. Given that we don’t have control over nukes in orbit, a bunch of us can go start jumping on the Cumbre Vieja.
Seen on Twitter:
for quotes, a fun game to play is “Shakespeare or Bible?”
– Obama’s lie is secure.
– And thus endeth todays lesson.
“Bumblefuck doubles down”
– I’ve got a tyranny and I’m not afraid to use it!
– My take is pretty much what we expected for his second term. Take as much advantage as possible. Even if some stuff is struck down, its always a lot easier to defend laws once they’re passed than getting them through in the first place.
– Call it the Progs scorched earth policy.
– Some of the Rats are starting to lobby for seats on the lifeboat when the O-tanic starts to sink in earnest:
“To keep this ruse going, a year later, The New York Times released its rewrite of the facts to protect Hillary, but the rewrite is apparently so ridiculous that even Dianne Feinstein isn’t buying it.”
– Imagine what the Democrats would be like if the populace wasn’t armed.
BBH, if the Establicans and the Democrats had their way, we’d have been unarmed yesterday.
I’m starting to think the gun-running explanation makes the most sense in regards to the cover-up. I mean, obviously, there is a cover-up, because the administration was way too quick with the “out of control demonstration” lie.
The question about “why” they were in Benghazi should never even need to come up, no matter how truthful it might be. It is (or should have been) irrelevant.
It should be a standard response to an attack on ANY US soil that the US military responds with extreme prejudice, rather than ordering men (already on alert for specifically such occasions, and within easy striking distance) to stand down for political reasons. Someone must have thought that the visual of the US actually defending itself against Muslim attackers, on September 11th of all dates, would be too inflammable to the American people (still clinging to their Gods and guns), and ruinous to the careers of people who had made much hay out of the death of Osama bin Laden the previous spring, and who needed the votes of those citizens come November.
Given that no one in the military chain of command — all the way up to SECDEF — was reporting that there was any protest, it had to come from somewhere else, and there are only two steps above SECDEF: VPOTUS and POTUS. Hillary was NOT in the military chain of command, and had no authority over military personnel, even though she had her own military callsign. (Broomstick One, if it matters.)
Neither is Valerie Jarrett.
Those orders countermanding standing policy had to come from one of those two people.
Hubs and I were having a discussion yesterday regarding chain of command and how there is none (or at least none that is recognizable anymore). He’s incensed with the Wahn and I’m starting to worry about his health.
These are trying times for you retired military. More so than for us civilians, I believe.
My oath was to the Constitution, not to a politician or ideology. Against all enemies, which explicitly includes the domestic kind.
Exactly so, Drum. Hubs said he didn’t know what he’d do if he were still active duty today. His duty, of course. Knowing the CiC doesn’t feel committed to the troops is something different than we’ve had in the past.
October 27 2012. This is one of the sources I referenced in a post.
The Libyans who attacked and their friends in the Libyan government planted the idea of the film which then was taken up by the Obama administration looking for a way to deflect questions of their own responsibility.
A good question is how the idea of using the film as an excuse came to be used by the Libyan government and the Islamist group[s] that did the attack. Another is how there came to be mortars well zeroed in on the annex.
A good question is how the idea of using the film as an excuse came to be used by the Libyan government and the Islamist group[s] that did the attack. Another is how there came to be mortars well zeroed in on the annex.
– That, and several other aspects of the “spontaneous attack” that have come to light as time goes by, leads one to almost start to believe there was “inside info” involved which was given to the terrorists.
– But thats just crazy talk.
Even McCain made the rather acid comment along the lines of “you don’t grab your mortars and rpg’s and head out to do some demonstrating.”
Someone must have thought that the visual of the US actually defending itself against Muslim attackers, on September 11th of all dates, would be too inflammable to the American people
Even the Chicago gang wouldn’t stick to such as story over mere politics, this long after the event.
They were up to something that the American people would never be OK with, even if they spun it like a top. Firing Gen. Ham because he said I’m going in anyway?
They couldn’t afford to let anyone outside the circle know what was up. I still can’t shake the idea that the Ambassador or someone else was being hung out to dry, for whatever reason: to please the Libyans or the terrorists or because he betrayed the Chicago gang.
You can’t put it past them to execute an inconvenient person in this way. You just can’t.
Hewitt’s been on a righteous tear today about “A Terrible ‘Deal’ in Which Only Career Military Are Called Upon To Sacrifice“:
Prior to the show, I proposed a drinking game for the Hewitt program: 1 sip for each guest who downplays the seriousness; 2 for those who claim it was a 3D chess victory.
He
interviewedgrilled Paul Ryan today and was dumfounded by Ryan’s unwillingness to stop this bill (2 sippy). Oddly enough, Lindsay Graham took Hugh’s side against Ryan (half-pint, neat), and Jonah Goldberg couldn’t see what the fuss was about (one sip).Jonah’s been weird since he took the wrong side on the Ted Cruz filibuster. He’s been downplaying all the hysteria, as if watching his own book play itself out is too unreal for him to imagine.
Mark Steyn has been AWOL from NRO since Christmas. Since he tore his colleague a new one over being Mr. Downplay.
Worse before it gets better, unfortunately.
I think the simplest explaination is that they’re arrogant. They believe their own propaganda, just as they believe their plans will always work because they’re their plans.
So the President, who’s out there telling anyone and everyone that he won the war on terror when he “got” Bin Ladin gets told a terrorist attack is underway, in Libya, a country he liberated. How can any of that be true? Cognotive dissonance ensues, followed by a taking to his pillows. Maybe things will look better in the morning.
The same way that, way back in 2000, then-PM Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount was the excuse for the start of the planned-in-advance and weapons-already-aimed-and-ready second intifada.
You think the Arab world didn’t learn from the world’s reaction (completely buying the bullshit narrative) that they could do that and get away with it again and again?
You all are right about needing to do more than just pray for a divine intervention. I was just having one of those days where it feels like the world is an upside-down, fun-house mirror of itself.
I should be past it, but I am still totally amazed and outraged that neither Hillary nor Obama have had to answer for how they handled Benghazi (let alone all of the other Obama stuff).
Persons of Victim Class Protected Status never do.
But to further give that concocted narrative teeth, a man was publicly arrested, thrown into jail, and left there for months under the pretense of a parole violation — in what has to be one of the most frightening instances of what a partisan, all-too-powerful government run by self-serving cretins is capable of. – See more at: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=52449#comments
This, to me, is an impeachable event.