Hillary and her Benghazi Eruptions
One of the things we learned during Wednesday’s hearings from Greg Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya and a career foreign service officer for 22 years, is that after he talked to investigators about Benghazi, he received a searing phone reprimand from a very angry Cheryl Mills, who happened to be the chief of staff to his boss, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
In the State Department, when Cheryl Mills calls, you pick up the phone. She’s been one of the Clintons’ right-hand men, so to speak, for decades. She worked in Bill’s White House legal office, then as counsel to Hillary’s presidential campaign, and then became chief of staff at State when Hillary was appointed secretary. She knows how to help handle “eruptions,” bimbo or otherwise.
When Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, visited Libya after the attack, Hicks said his bosses told him not to talk to the congressman. When he did anyway, and a State Department lawyer was excluded from one meeting because he lacked the necessary security clearance, Hicks said he received the angry phone call from Mills.
Hicks, who is no member of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary imagined hounded her husband, soon learned the hard way what happens when you tell the truth and a Clinton is involved. The once-deputy chief of mission in Libya found himself demoted to desk officer. A long string of glowing performance reviews morphed into criticisms of his management style and leadership.
Hillary has never let anyone stand in the way of her ambition. She is the leading contender for 2016, and having Lady Macbeth in the White House will only make the Obama years look good.
It seems to me as though Ramirez is a little bit ahead of the score here. That is, it’s hard to think the trap has actually sprung, despite the undeniable truth that sufficient factual knowledge roams abroad in the world to warrant loosing the spring.
For my part, I await a Howard Baker type among the Democrats, not one of whom has assumed that role as yet. Until the time one honest Democrat steps forward to forcefully refuse to play the administration’s game, I can think only in terms of the sword of Damocles, still hanging by a thread above Clinton’s head, and she below, untouched. That is, the capacity of the electorate to refuse to see the fact situation is beyond reckoning. Until it isn’t.
Wow.
I tried to count how many times he tried to hang Benghazi around the Republicans necks and lost count. That Romney jab was really out there.
Permit me to assert a thought returning to the Nakoula video: the White House has liked to pin on this video “the” motivation underlying the “protests”, not just at Benghazi but of course at Cairo, in the Sudan, everywhere across the Arab-Muslim world where such “protests” arose.
I say, however, that the video itself was never more than a silly pretext, just as the Muhammed cartoons from Denmark, sufficiently embellished and passed around the Muslim world by clever and zealous jihadists, were a pretext.
But the Obama White House makes nothing of this. Never has. The Obama White House has always been content to pretend that “demonstrations” at various US facilities were spontaneous reactions to the sudden appearance of the Nakoula video in the Arab world.
Bullshit, say I. These pretextual “demonstrations” were never spontaneous. They were always arranged to occur on Sept 11th, fueled by the propagandistic use of the Nakoula video.
Community Organizers must always give deference to other Organizer’s efforts and never allude that these carefully planned “spontaneous” demonstrations are planned, in advance, in detail. Even when they are sorta half-assed and fail.
As more comes out the reports from the scene seem more and more to be what really happened.
Steve Hayes: *** The original CIA talking points had been blunt: The assault on U.S. facilities in Benghazi was a terrorist attack conducted by a large group of Islamic extremists, including some with ties to al Qaeda.
These were strong claims. The CIA usually qualifies its assessments, providing policymakers a sense of whether the conclusions of its analysis are offered with “high confidence,” “moderate confidence,” or “low confidence.” That first draft signaled confidence, even certainty: “We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.”
There was good reason for this conviction. Within 24 hours of the attack, the U.S. government had intercepted communications between two al Qaeda-linked terrorists discussing the attacks in Benghazi. One of the jihadists, a member of Ansar al Sharia, reported to the other that he had participated in the assault on the U.S. diplomatic post. Solid evidence. And there was more. Later that same day, the CIA station chief in Libya had sent a memo back to Washington, reporting that eyewitnesses to the attack said the participants were known jihadists, with ties to al Qaeda. ***
Wherein Susan Rice tarred and feathered herself in accord with the Obazmites wishes. Be a bird, Susan, fly free!
And how funny is it that the White House now claims its sole alteration of the talking points was to change the term “consulate” to “special mission”, when its spokes-tool Susan Rice couldn’t even get that nice bit right?
From her ABC interview:
*** Rice: “We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to — or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo.” ***
Thomas Jocelyn, The Long War Journal: Egyptian interior minister: Al Qaeda cell plotted suicide attack against Western embassy
*** Egypt’s interior minister announced today the arrest of three members of an al Qaeda cell who were plotting to attack a Western embassy. “The interior ministry was able to direct a qualitative blow to a terrorist cell which was planning to carry out suicide attacks against vital, important and foreign establishments,” Mohammed Ibrahim said at a press conference.
Ibrahim did not name the embassy that the trio were allegedly plotting against, but he did say that they eyed targets in Cairo and Alexandria. ***
What thoughtful US diplomat working in the Middle East under the Obazmites wouldn’t be scared stiff right now?
But take heart from Eric Nordstrom, diplomats: “You’re on your own.”
David Gelernter: Who is on trial for Benghazi?
*** It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today and, to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media. For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first? Obviously their first instinct was to defend the Democratic administration. Republicans would have done the same. But starting with the Hayes story on the Rice propaganda points (and the neo-Soviet process that turned them from truth to lies), and then the Issa hearing Wednesday (and a recent ABC news piece focusing again on the phonied-up talking points), no honest observer can fail to suspect this administration of doing unspeakable things. It is Congress’s duty to find out the truth.
How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud? We know exactly how. It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate—but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee. Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?” Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador? Which cabinet member will be Eliot Richardson and resign rather than continuing to be part of a coverup? Will John Kerry rise to the challenge? ***
Victoria Toensing: Administration Relying on Shoddy Benghazi Report to Absolve Itself of Blame —
*** In addition, the ARB used procedures no seasoned investigator would ever follow. More significantly, the process was unfair to the witnesses. For example, no stenographer was present. So there is no verbatim transcript of testimony from each witness. The ARB used note takers. Mr. Hicks was not allowed to review the note taker’s document that supposedly reflects what he said, but is limited to what the note taker thought he heard and decided to record. Mr. Hicks was not permitted to review the draft ARB report to suggest corrections or point out any omissions. He has never been allowed to read the classified report.
The unfair process, in fact, has become even more troubling since I received calls from reporters after last week’s hearing telling me that unnamed State Department persons are whispering that Mr. Hicks’s statements to the ARB are “inconsistent” with his congressional testimony. The congressional testimony is more expansive because both Democratic and Republican staff interviewed Mr. Hicks, and others, for nearly five hours. By contrast, the ARB questioned Mr. Hicks for only two hours, despite the fact that he was the highest-ranking State Department official in Tripoli the night of the attack. Inconsistent? No! And how would anyone disprove that false claim without a transcript?
The ARB report has at least one significant discrepancy, inconsistent with what Mr. Hicks told the Board. He specifically stated, with Pickering present, that the reason Ambassador Christopher Stevens went to Benghazi was to establish a permanent constituent post, an assignment received directly from Clinton in May 2012 when he was sworn in as ambassador. Soon after, Stevens told Mr. Hicks about this assignment over lunch when they discussed the procedures for getting the task done. When Mr. Hicks arrived in Tripoli in July 2012 they revisited the needs related to making Benghazi a permanent post. At the time, Stevens had out of country commitments and could not go to Benghazi until September. The trip was scheduled for mid-September because the report about building structures and security had to be submitted before the end of the fiscal year: September 30.
When Mr. Hicks told the ARB the reason for the trip, Pickering visibly flinched and said: “Does the 7th floor know about this?” (The office of the Secretary of State is on the 7th floor.)
This relevant information was omitted in the ARB’s unclassified report. Worse, it was concealed by a false statement: “The Board found that Ambassador Stevens made the decision to travel to Benghazi independently of Washington, per standard practice. Timing for his trip was driven in part by commitments in Tripoli, as well as a staffing gap … in Benghazi.” Mr. Hicks testified in the hearing that Washington was well aware prior to the trip that Stevens was going to Benghazi. ***
Richard Benedetto: Obama Got a Pass on Benghazi . . .
Not because Obama wanted a pass on Benghazi; not because Obama had his administration spin a story calculated to obtain himself a pass on Benghazi, and then repeated that story endlessly for weeks; not because the “working” press in the White House determined they too wanted to give Obama a pass on Benghazi, and so would refuse to ask simple questions eliciting the truth about Benghazi and poking holes in the falsehoods the White House and State Department were peddling; not because every single Democrat in public life worked like devils to carry the false stories spun-up by the White House in their every address to the public, again never questioning the obvious falsehoods on offer, but marching every one of them in lock-step to the talking points which issued daily from the Democrat machine.
No. Of course not. How could that be?
Obama got a pass on Benghazi because . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mitt Romney.
And who didn’t know? Why, Jay Carney told us so only a couple of days ago.
Romney had help from the infantile babblings of the propaganda whores on Fox News who went into breathless Nancy Grace slut mode for weeks on end
Sure it is that the White House press corps would be asking “Was Nancy Grace on station at the CIA annex in Benghazi?”, “Was there hip shaking involved as they attempted to escape the smoke?”, “Did Nancy determine that Ambassador Stevens even be in Benghazi on Sept. 11th? (why, that little devil Nancy, always stirring up trouble!)”, “Could we get shot of Jay Carney staring down into Nancy’s shrieky cleavage?” “Is that taffeta Michelle has on today?” and so on.
the White House press corp does what they’re told they’re like those people at Lowe’s you see on the ladders you’re not supposed to use yourself cause of how their insurance policy is written