By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--December 30, 2013
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Fifteen months after Mr. Stevens’s death, the question of responsibility remains a searing issue in Washington, framed by two contradictory story lines. One has it that the video, which was posted on YouTube, inspired spontaneous street protests that got out of hand. This version, based on early intelligence reports, was initially offered publicly by Susan E. Rice, who is now Mr. Obama’s national security adviser. The other, favored by Republicans, holds that Mr. Stevens died in a carefully planned assault by Al Qaeda to mark the anniversary of its strike on the United States 11 years before. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of covering up evidence of Al Qaeda’s role to avoid undermining the president’s claim that the group has been decimated, in part because of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The investigation by The Times shows that the reality in Benghazi was different, and murkier, than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.The Times apparently believes it can write crap like this and everyone will just believe it. Know what? Don't tell them. The more the Times descends into a bad mockery of itself, the more obvious it becomes that the cover stories this White House and its allies generate are worthy of nothing but laughter. Let's see, where to begin? Of course you would expect that Fox News would respond pretty quickly to the Times' nonsense with sources of its own, and Adam Housley deals with the Times' claim that Al Qaeda was not a factor:
The community of operators in Libya that night and since includes the CIA, FBI, U.S. military, U.S. State Department and contractors working for the United States in a number of capacities. According to multiple sources on the ground that night, all the intelligence personnel in Benghazi before the attack and there now understand Al Qaeda is a significant threat in Libya. Recent reports also suggest that Libyan militia leader Ahmad Abu Khattallah is the mastermind of the attack and had no real connections to Al Qaeda or terrorist organizations. Multiple sources, though, challenged that claim. They insist that while Khattallah was found responsible for the actions at the actual consulate and was essentially the ground force commander that night, he is also clearly tied to Ansar al-Sharia and to the broader terrorist network. “There is direct evidence linking him before the attack and after the attack to terrorist groups. An opportunity came, and Khattallah conducted an assault on the consulate. To say that it wasn’t tied to Al Qaeda is completely false. There is literal evidence in many forms and shapes, directly linking him," one source said.Remember, the Times has a track record of trying to deny the Al Qaeda threat. During the Iraq War, it wouldn't even refer to the group Al Qaeda in Iraq by its real name, insisting on calling it "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia," so determined were Times editors to deny Bush Administration claims that the group was active in Iraq. Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer says you have to engage in suspension of disbelief to accept the claims of the Times: Meanwhile, Breitbart points out that the new claims from the Times are contradicted by the reporting of a major U.S. metropolitan newspaper - the New York Times. Kerry Pickett's piece for Breitbart quotes multiple pieces of Times reporting that spell out in detail the ties between Al Qaeda and the very people the Times now tries to say have nothing to do with Al Qaeda. So why do this? Why publish a phony "investigation" more than a year after the attack, when the issue is no longer front and center in the headlines (although Congressman Darrell Issa's investigation is still very much active) and come out with such a lame and transparent attempt to buttress an administration lie long since exposed for what it was? There would seem to be two possible explanations. One would be to try to bait Republicans into a re-hash of Benghazi because Democrats would rather talk about anything but ObamaCare. If Democrats can convince the public the Repubilcans are obsessing over a non-event in an attempt to manufacture a phony scandal, that could conceivably help them limit the mid-term bloodbath 2014 could very well become as a result of ObamaCare. The second explanation would be to provide cover for Hillary, whose empty claim that she was a great Secretary of State is going to be crucial to her 2016 pursuit of the presidency. If the electorate understands that the State Department under Hillary's leadership attempted to whitewash a terrorist attack that killed four Americans so as to escape blame for failing to protect our personnel, then she loses every advantage she tried to build up by spending four years flying around and doing nothing of substance. You have to understand, Hillary became Secretary of State to burnish her presidential credientials, not to actually serve the American people. The whole point was to look like she was doing something meaningful, not to actually do it. That's why her first instinct after the Benghazi story broke was to lie. (Well, that and because she's just a liar.) That's why she demanded to know what difference it makes at this point. Accountability to the truth is not a Hillary priority except in the exceedingly rare circumstance when the truth makes her look good, and Benghazi was definitely not one of those. So the Times, whose mission is to run interference for current and (they hope) future Democrat presidents, is duty-bound to produce a phony piece of nonsense that tries against all odds to lend credence to Hillary's tall tale. They've done this sort of thing for years, and they used to get away with it pretty much scot-free because there was no one out there to call them on it. Times have changed. The Times has not.
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