When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.
ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.
This is a paragraph drafted by the CIA in its earlier versions of the talking points:
“The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”
After reading that paragraph, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it
“could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?”
John Hayward has an excellent piece over at Red State titled Benghazi hearings in the Mirror Universe on the testimony by whistle-blowers in the Benghazi hearings on Wednesday of this week, and the attempts by the media to bury it.
It’s amazing to watch the media buryyesterday’s explosive testimony on Benghazi. Just imagine for a moment that today is the day after a veteran career diplomat – the top man on the ground in Libya after the murder of the ambassador – testified that a Republicanadministration told him not to cooperate with Democratcongressional investigators, shook him up with a menacing phone call from the top political “fixer” for a Secretary of State widely viewed as a leading 2016 presidential candidate, demoted him under cloudy circumstances so they could portray him as “disgruntled”… and then spent eight months loudly boasting of their enthusiastic, transparent cooperation with Congress. Imagine the media coverage – from the glowing profile of Gregory Hicks as a new whistleblower demigod in the pantheon of good-government heroes, to the hows of outrage that noble truth-seeking Congressmen were thwarted by the machinations of a shadowy White House bent on preserving its electoral viability, no matter the cost to public transparency or national security…
…Remember how reporters were grazing through the rubble and finding important documents, such as Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ journal, while the FBI was still bottled up in Tripoli? Remember how the Administration kept falsely claiming the “crime scene” was under control, even though it wasn’t? You sure would remember that if Barack Obama was a Republican, because the media would be busy stitching together montages of all the false Administration claims and comparing them to Hicks’ testimony from yesterday…
…In the Mirror Universe where this is a Republican scandal, you can bet your bottom dollar that the media would never have stopped asking why Stevens was so poorly defended, and why there was no plan in place to mount an effective rescue operation. Instead, they let Obama apologists get away with talking as if they knew exactly how long the attack would last…
…Above all, a Republican administration’s claims of “transparency” would lie in ruins after yesterday’s hearings. That’s an incontrovertible conclusion for anyone who paid the slightest attention to the testimony. There were very specific allegations about Administration interference with congressional investigations, and no one has attempted to refute them. There is no way to square this whistleblower testimony with the notion of an honest White House and Secretary of State working with Congress and keeping the American people informed. That would be a huge story for the media today, if they were not primarily interested in ignoring all that bombshell testimony, so they can push the Obama-approved line that Benghazi is old news. Just try to imagine them performing such a service for a Republican president.
It is amazing to watch these people in the media who claim to be “journalists” give cover to a Democrat Administration in a scandal that involved the death of 4 Americans, a cover up, intimidation of whistle-blowers and a continuous misleading of the American people. We’ve gotten to the point in our country where the only time that Democrats, or the media, cares when someone dies is when it helps them politically (think Sandy Hook). But, in defense of the media, it is probably how most of them are taught at “Journalism” School.
Back in 2007, Hillary Clinton firmly believed that President Bush had to come to Congress to seek authority for military action against Iran. She stated:
If the administration believes that any, any use of force against Iran is necessary, the president must come to Congress to seek that authority.
This is the video of Clinton making her remarks (Go to 3:49):
Surprisingly, Clinton was called out for her hypocrisy on this matter (as was Obama) by Jake Tapper (go to 8:55):
So, to sum it all up, when a Republican President wants to take our country to war, he absolutely MUST get Congressional approval. But when a Democrat is President, as long as the mission is humanitarian in nature, and is part of a coalition, don’t worry about that pesky ‘ole Congressional approval.
Ted Koppel kits the nail on the head (possibly for the first time in his career):
Why did Libya win the humanitarian defense sweepstakes of 2011?
Koppel argues that many countries throughout the world have had much greater civilian loss than Libya, including the Congo, Sudan and the Ivory Coast. So, why Libya?
Why are liberals such shameless hypocrites when it comes to war? It’s as though they don’t realize that what they’ve said during the Bush years is in print and on video for the whole world to see…forever. We know what you’ve said in the past, and now you have the exact opposite position, solely because a Obama is President. It’s pathetic. And they have the nerve to call Republicans “hypocrites” and “unpatriotic” for criticizing Obama’s handling of the Libyan war.
I have only been following politics closely for about six years. Like most people, 9/11 shook me up and later led to me paying close attention to what goes on in our country, and the world. George W. Bush happened to be president when I started paying attention and I was always shocked at how his political opponents (liberals) attacked him mercilessly, particularly over the Iraq war. Liberals called him every name in the book. Idiot and war criminal were particularly popular. Another thing that stood out was how liberals continuously claimed that “dissent was patriotic.” A perfect example of that here:
For a while, I thought that being anti-war was just part of being a liberal. I heard their criticisms of the war every single day for years. I didn’t think that which party held the Presidency had any bearing on their position on the United States getting involved in war. I just figured they would oppose it no matter who was President, Democrat or Republican. Boy, was I wrong! I quickly found out that most liberals are only anti-war when a Republican is in the White House. They go on radio and TV every single day and criticize Republicans for the cost of the war, both in dollars and lives.
But, when Obama was elected, something miraculous happened. The anti-war protests went silent (for the most part). All of a sudden, when Obama gives the go ahead to launch over 200 Tomahawk missiles at Libya, the liberal media have become “hawkish” on war kinetic military action.
During the Bush years, liberals felt that it was their duty as Americans to dissent. This was their mantra. Now it appears that Republicans who criticize Obama for taking our country to war in Libya are “unpatriotic” and are “siding with the terrorists.” Ed Schultz, and other liberals, are making statement today that they would have vehemently disagreed with just a few short years ago. They had no problems calling Republicans war criminals for invading Iraq. They were not interested in hearing about the atrocities performed by Saddam Hussein on his own people. They were not interested in a humanitarian war kinetic military operation to protect the lives of innocent civilians back then. Now it seems protecting civilians is the right thing to do, no matter the cost.
But, it appears that not all liberals agree with Mr. Ed. The Nation’s, Jeremy Scahill calls him out:
I respect people like Jeremy Scahill. At least he is consistent and his anti-war position has not changed due to the fact that a Democrat is in the White House, unlike every host on MSNBC. Mr. Scahill has a leg to stand on. He is against war, in general, not based on which party holds the Presidency.
I didn’t think it was possible for MSNBC to have less credibility, but it is happening. It started with their over-the-top cheerleading for Obama during the 2008 Presidential campaign. Now they are dropping all previous anti-war positions and arguments proving they are nothing more than pathetic lap dogs. But, on the bright side, some day a Republican will get elected again and they will be free to jump back on the anti-war bandwagon.
Is Hillary Clinton guilty of sedition based on this clip?
Sedition – conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch.
Recently, Joe Klein of Time Magazine stated that people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin “were nudging up close to the edge of sedition.” And his buddy John Heilemann added Rush Limbaugh to the mix for good measure. It seems that the “journalists” in the media have amnesia. They seem to have forgotten the vitriol that was spewed for 8 years during the Bush presidency. Instead of it being patriotic to dissent, as it was while Bush was in office, it is now a crime in their minds.
Enemy of the Statist 