Clinton, not Bush responsible for Benghazi deaths

You may have seen the memes that list all of the supposed G. W. Bush “Benghazi” being posted by those wanting to defend President Obama and his former Secretary of State and current presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. After some personal fact-checking, I give all the memes that say so an F for false and nonequivalent comparison of events. There were not any Benghazis when George W. Bush was President. Consider the following:

There was no other attack on an embassy or consulate that was a repeated attack by hundreds of enemies, let alone one that lasted 13 hours, with 3 of the 4 people being killed in the last hour or so of the attacks because military help that was available never showed up. And since the Bush administration had no ongoing attacks that could have received additional assistance during the attacks, the G. W. Bush administration had no instances of the President's and the Secretary of State's whereabouts or activities during the attack remaining unexplained to the American people. There was no deadly attack of Americans or non-Americans under President Bush where his administration falsely blamed it on a video, and did so continually for two weeks, and still refers to the inconsequential video as having something to do with it. When George W. Bush was President there was no pre-planned assault on any overseas American building or operation that was falsely described afterwards by the Administration as a spontaneous demonstration gone awry.

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There was no attack when President Bush was campaigning two months before his re-election in which the killing of an Ambassador and several others was completely ignored by the liberal media in order to help him get re-elected. Unlike Benghazi, there were no US ambassadors murdered when George W. Bush was President. 1979 in Afghanistan was the last time and place that a U.S. Ambassador, Adolph Dubs, was assassinated, when Jimmy Carter was President. Whichever meme you read, there were as many total people that died during the Benghazi attack as were killed in the whole list of attacks during the George W. Bush administration on U.S. and U.S-affiliated locations, which include U.S. citizens (very few or none on any of the memes), people associated with the U.S., and the attackers killed. Estimates were 50 to 100 (possibly many more) anti-American attackers killed in the wave after wave of attacks in Benghazi. The day after Bill Clinton appeared on Meet the Press, June 29, 2014, CNSnews.com wrote the following:

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“ ‘When ten different instances occurred when President Bush was in office where American diplomatic personnel were killed in, in – around the world, how many outraged Republican members of Congress were there?’ Clinton asked during NBC Meet the Press interview on Sunday. “ ‘Zero,’ he added. “Unstated by the former president, however, was the fact that those U.S. diplomatic personnel who were killed during the George W. Bush administration died in circumstances other than an attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission:

• Barbara Green, an employee at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, was killed in a 2002 hand grenade attack on a church in the Pakistani capital. Four other people were killed in the attack, including Green’s daughter.
• USAID officer Laurence Foley was shot dead outside his home in Amman, Jordan, in 2002.
• Bureau of Diplomatic Security officer Edward Seitz was killed in a 2004 mortar attack on a U.S. military base near the Baghdad airport.
• Jim Mollen, the U.S. Embassy’s consultant to Iraq’s education ministry, was shot dead while driving in Baghdad in 2004.
• David Foy, facilities maintenance officer at the U.S. Consulate in Karachi was targeted and killed in a 2006 suicide bomb attack in his car near the consulate in Pakistan’s biggest city. His driver was also killed.
• USAID official John Granville was shot dead in his car while returning from a New Year’s Eve party at the British Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, in 2008.”

We can say that every President in modern times has had numerous instances of deaths at U.S. facilities or during U.S.-sponsored activities in foreign countries. And if we count the number of American people killed in wars during Presidential administrations, deaths would add up to tens of thousands per President in the Mexican War (13,203), the Korean War (56,246), the Vietnam War (90,220), and World War I (116,516), and hundreds of thousands in the Civil War (498,332) and World War II (405,399). So the point isn’t to simply wanting to assign blame to Ms. Clinton and President Obama for the number killed during the Benghazi attack. The attack could have led to the death of dozens of Americans and those working for the Americans, yet there is no indication that Clinton and Obama did what you or I would have done, staying up all night or following minute-by-minute what was going on, attempting to expedite a rescue. They never even got a flyover by American aircraft OK’d to try and scare the attackers away! If you haven’t seen the movie 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, please see it. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so emotionally invested in a movie. It’s one of the most compelling movies I’ve seen in a long time. Soldiers were readied to be flown in but they never went. Fighter jets were available to be scrambled. And we’re told by the Obama administration and Democrat Party leadership that all the investigation that needs to be done has been done. A President that came into office with promises of transparency has been anything but that. There has been no accounting for what the President and Secretary Clinton were doing during the Benghazi tragedy, yet we got all kind of detail about how closely the Administration monitored the killing of Osama bin Laden. The Department of State still needs to be investigated for putting their employees in such a dangerous environment. Funding was not the issue, because if the consulate was in danger, a simple evacuation would not have busted the budget. We need to be assured action has been taken to help prevent current and future diplomatic, CIA, and other American personnel, from being knowingly put in such dangerous situations. No, Benghazi was not just another incident to be listed and equated with American deaths overseas during the Obama, Bush, Clinton, or any other Administration. It stands out as a failure to act by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, and then a cover-up by a President running for re-election and a Secretary of State planning to be his successor four years later.