Tag Archives: Susan Rice

It Took A While, But The Truth Is Out

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This post is based on two articles–one at Power Line by John Hinderaker, and one by Sharyl Attkisson at sharylattkisson.com.  Both articles deal with the cover-up of what happened in Benghazi in September 2011.

John Hinderaker at Power Line posted a picture of the memo that called for the misleading talking points:

BenghaziMemoThere is a second memo between Susan Rice and Eric Pelofsky shown in the John Hinderaker article. This memo expresses concern over the fate of the ambassador.

John Hinderaker observes:

The other striking fact about the emails is the complete absence of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Maybe someone was keeping them informed, but they are never mentioned in the emails (except when someone prepares a statement to be issued under their names). During the crucial hours, they are never referred to. There is no suggestion that they are playing a part; that they are in the loop; that they are making decisions; or that they are, in any way, important players. Maybe there are more emails, not yet disclosed, that would reflect their roles. Or maybe they really were ciphers–seat warmers with no concerns beyond the political, not expected to do anything in an hour of crisis.

Sharyl Attkisson reports:

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told me today that the government apparently tried to keep the Rhodes email out of Congress and the public’s hands by classifying it after-the-fact.

“They retroactively changed the classification,” Chaffetz says. “That was an unclassified document and they changed it to classified.”  

 In the past month, the government has supplied 3,200 new Benghazi-related documents under Congressional subpoena. In some instances, Congressional members and their staff are only permitted to see the documents during certain time periods in a review room, and cannot remove them or make copies.

 Chaffetz says that the State Department redacted more material on the copies provided to Congress than on those that it was forced to provide to JudicialWatch.

 One of the most heavily-redacted email exchanges is entitled, “FOX News: US officials knew Libya attack was terrorism within 24 hours, sources confirm.” The Fox News article was circulated among dozens of officials including Rhodes and then-Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough but the content of their email discussion is hidden.

The White House lied about Benghazi and then covered up its lies. The lies were told for political purposes–it was the middle of an election campaign. This is an impeachable offense, but America does not have the stomach for impeachment right now. It would be a mistake for the Republicans to go down that road at all. However, an effort should be made to get this story into the mainstream media and make sure Americans are aware that they have been lied to and are still being lied to. The only reason we have these emails is the work of Judicial Watch.

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Why We Need Real Answers On Benghazi

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Benghazi was a horrible event. Killing an ambassador is an act of war, but somehow in all the discussion that fact has been overlooked. I’m not sure what we would have accomplished by going to war with Libya, but on the other hand, not doing much of anything hasn’t worked either.

To add to the miscellaneous information that has dripped out about the Benghazi attack, the report of the Bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Report cites former CIA Director Mike Morell as having a major role in creating the talking points used by Susan Rice on the Sunday news shows after the attack. (see Fox News video February 3, 2014.)

The Washington Free Beacon also posted the story yesterday.

The article in the Washington Free Beacon reports:

On September 15 one day before Susan Rice made her infamous appearances on various Sunday shows, according to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report Morell received an email from the CIA station chief in Libya indicating the Benghazi attacks were “not/not an escalation of protests.” The report does not indicate when Morell read the email, but that same day Morell cut the word “Islamic” from the talking points and left the word “demonstration.”

On September 16, Morell emailed embassy staff in Tripoli asking for more information. The FBI and CIA reviewed the closed circuit footage on September 18 showing there were no protests. Yet, President Obama still employed the “demonstration” verbiage just days later.

It is becoming obvious that the Obama Administration chose to lie to the American people about the Benghazi attack–who did it and why. It was politically expedient to lie about the attack, because admitting it was an Al Qaeda attack would have created a problem with President Obama’s statement that Al Qaeda had been destroyed. The attack on Benghazi might also have been seen as a threat to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions.

The article further reports:

Adding another layer of complexity to the Morell’s backstory, Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.) told Fox News many of Morell’s recent statements on the war on terror run contrary to what he told Senate committees over the previous decade as a CIA employee.

Herridge goes on to report some speculate Morell may have higher political ambitions considering his employment at Beacon Global Strategies, a government relations firm founded by close Hillary Clinton confidante Philippe I. Reines.

Whatever the reason for the lies, a country that elects leadership that puts politics above national security will not continue to exist in a world where terrorism is growing stronger. Islamic radicals now control more territory in the Middle East than they did before President Obama took office. This is not a good thing for innocent civilians in these areas (or non-Muslims), and it is not a good thing for America.

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Working Hard To Fail

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Today’s Wall Street Journal features and article by Norman Podhoretz entitled, “Obama’s Successful Foreign Failure.” In this article Mr. Podhoretz puts forth the theory that President Obama is following an agenda designed to reduce the influence of America around the world.

The article states:

But foreign policy was another matter. As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country’s power and influence. And just as he had to fend off the still-toxic socialist label at home, so he had to take care not to be stuck with the equally toxic “isolationist” label abroad.

This he did by camouflaging his retreats from the responsibilities bred by foreign entanglements as a new form of “engagement.” At the same time, he relied on the war-weariness of the American people and the rise of isolationist sentiment (which, to be sure, dared not speak its name) on the left and right to get away with drastic cuts in the defense budget, with exiting entirely from Iraq and Afghanistan, and with “leading from behind” or using drones instead of troops whenever he was politically forced into military action.

How does this relate to the current question of whether or not we should intervene in Syria? I question whether President Obama is depending on Congress to vote ‘no’ on military intervention on Syria and let him off the hook for his reckless statement. The fact that Susan Rice is being sent out to make the case for military intervention in Syria causes me to wonder if he really wants to make the case.

The Weekly Standard posted an article today stating:

“The White House has had quite enough of the controversy over ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, the misleading talking points she used in TV interviews about the jihadist attacks in Benghazi, and the Obama administration’s contradictory narrative about those attacks,” Steve Hayes reported in December. 

But today, Rice will be called upon again to make a public case for the White House — this time, she’ll be talking about Syria. Except now Rice is the national security adviser, a promotion she received in the last year.

There are two options here for President Obama. First of all, if Congress votes ‘no,’ he can ignore the wishes of Congress, attack anyway, and cause a Constitutional crisis. That will deflect from the problems with ObamaCare, the debt ceiling, unemployment, etc. Politically that could work toward his advantage since Congress is not likely to call him on the Constitutional question. Secondly, if Congress votes ‘no,’ he could not attack and blame the Republicans in Congress for refusing to support him. He might gain a few political points from that approach also. I am not mentioning an option where Congress votes ‘yes’ because I can’t imagine that happening. There is not a lot of support in Congress for an attack on Syria. Oddly enough, I suspect there is more support from Republicans on an attack than from Democrats. Blaming the Republicans for a ‘no’ vote would only work if the news media played along.

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The Dog Ate My Homework

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Hot Air reported yesterday that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has lost its receipts for its $4 million gala in Anaheim three years ago. (Don’t try this at home–if you can’t produce receipts for the IRS, the deduction is not allowed.) I love irony.

The article reports:

…This particular conference was held around the time they first started targeting tea partiers in the nonprofits division. While they were demanding reams of information from small groups, most of which have budgets under $25,000 a year, they were farting out millions of dollars you gave them with no serious attempt to account for how it was spent.

That’s not the language I would have used, but it does make the point.

The article states:

I asked on Twitter this morning, in honor of Susan Rice’s promotion to NSA and Victoria Nuland’s impending promotion to Assistant Secretary of State, whether anyone — anyone — has been held accountable yet for any of the scandals on Obama’s watch. Lois Lerner and one of the Benghazi scapegoats are on “administrative leave,” a.k.a. paid vacation, but haven’t been fired, thanks in part to union rules that make it difficult for the feds to can crappy employees. Steve Miller resigned as IRS commissioner, but he famously had just a few weeks left in his term when he did. Has anyone else been punished? Has Obama demanded a resignation from anyone inside the White House itself to prove his displeasure? He won’t boot Eric Holder over the DOJ leak dragnets either, despite the fact that some Democrats (including Democrats in the White House) also think he should go. What you’re seeing here, between the promotion/retention of malfeasors and incompetents and the IRS showering itself with cash with no serious effort made at keeping track of it, is the feds’ contempt for citizens who empowered them unleashed.

I don’t know how we got to runaway government, but we need to find a way to get back to government by the people very quickly.

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Is It Acceptable To Lie To The Public?

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On Thursday President Obama nominated Victoria Nuland to be assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs at the State Department. Ms. Nuland was the State Department spokesperson during the Benghazi press conferences. She was also involved in revising the talking points given to Susan Rice regarding the Benghazi attack before Ms. Rice went on the Sunday talk shows.

Fox News posted an article today explaining the problem of promoting Victoria Nuland:

Nuland’s statements on Benghazi are sure to be thoroughly examined. 

On Sept. 17, 2012, six days after the attack, she declined to label it an act of terrorism. 

“I don’t think we know enough. I don’t think we know enough,” she said. 

That was a day after U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice said on several Sunday shows that the strike was triggered by protests over an anti-Islam film. Rice for months has been the target of Republican ire over the administration’s mixed signals on the attack narrative. But a set of emails released by the Obama administration this month in fact showed Nuland and other officials involved in editing the talking points before Rice’s appearance. 

Nuland challenged references to extremists being involved in the attack, and objected to references to prior security warnings and incidents. 

The things Ms. Nuland said were outright lies. Even if she was pressured into lying by her superiors, has it become a policy of our government to promote people who lie? Don’t we need people in the government who will stand up and tell the truth regardless of the consequences?

I am sure Victoria Nuland has been a valued member of the State Department. I have a problem, however, promoting someone who chose departmental loyalty over loyalty to the American people. Was she required to take an oath pledging to uphold the U. S. Constitution? If she was, I suspect that her actions after Benghazi violated that oath. It is unfortunate that she got caught up in this mess, but it also unfortunate that she made the choice to lie to the American people.

Where Do We Go From Here?

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I am sure that by now much of the testimony from the Benghazi hearings is up on YouTube. If not there, I am sure it is floating around the Internet somewhere.  If you were not able to watch any of the hearings, I strongly recommend finding them on the Internet and spending some time.

The Benghazi hearings told us much of what we already knew–before the attack there were incidents that should have resulted in increased security rather than decreased security, during the attack the help that was needed never arrived, and after the attack almost everything we were told by the Obama Administration was a lie.

So where are we and where do we go from here? We do actually need at least one more hearing. We need to know who ordered the Special Forces that wanted to go to help at Benghazi to stand down. We need to know who changed to talking points for the Sunday news shows for Susan Rice and why. We need to know why Susan Rice was sent out rather than Hillary Clinton (we probably can make some pretty good guesses on that one). We need to know what Chris Stevens was doing at the annex without adequate security on September 11.

Will we ever get answers to any of those questions? Not unless we demand them from our representatives. If we as Americans do not hold our politicians accountable, they will not be accountable. The ball is in our court.

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The Statement Released After The Meeting

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Yesterday Breitbart.com posted the statement released by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John McCain (R-AZ), and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) after their meeting with UN Ambassador Susan Rice.

This is the statement:

We respectfully disagree with the White House’s statement today that ‘there are no unanswered questions’ about Ambassador Rice’s September 16 Sunday show appearances and the talking points she used. 

Around 10:00 this morning in a meeting requested by Ambassador Rice, accompanied by acting CIA Director Mike Morell, we asked Mr. Morell who changed the unclassified talking points to remove references to al-Qaeda.  In response, Mr. Morell said the FBI removed the references and did so to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.  We were surprised by this revelation and the reasoning behind it.

However, at approximately 4:00 this afternoon, CIA officials contacted us and indicated that Acting Director Morell misspoke in our earlier meeting. The CIA now says that it deleted the al-Qaeda references, not the FBI.  They were unable to give a reason as to why.

We are disturbed by the Administration’s continued inability to answer even the most basic questions about the Benghazi attack and the Administration’s response. 

Beyond Ambassador Rice’s misstatements, we continue to have questions about what happened in Benghazi before, during, and after the attack on our consulate – as well as the President’s statements regarding the attack.

Perhaps most important, we also need to understand why the U.S. military was unable to respond within seven hours to save American lives in Benghazi and why our consulate was left so unsecure despite a series of previous attacks. 

In more than a dozen letters, we and other Senators have repeatedly requested that the Administration provide answers to our questions.  Yet, today most of them remain unanswered.  We eagerly await their response.

It does seem from this statement that answers to even basic questions about Benghazi are nearly impossible to come by.  At least someone should know who actually changed the talking points or why no help was available to the Americans in Benghazi. At the rate we are going, we might have some of these answers after the 2016 election.

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When National Security Takes A Backseat To Politics

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Today was the day General Petraeus testified before Congress on the Benghazi attack of September 11. MRC.TV is reporting on a statement made by Representative Peter King after the General testified.

This is the video:

The article reports Representative King’s statement:

Representative Peter King stated that former CIA Director David Petraeus stated that he knew the Benghazi attack was terrorism and that the talking points given to Ambassador Susan Rice were different from the ones prepared by the CIA. Petraeus stated Rice’s talking points were edited to demphasized the possibility of terrorism. 

The reason behind this is simple. The Democrat Convention was all about killing Osama Bin Laden and the end of Al Qaeda. The attack on Benghazi showed that Al Qaeda was alive and quite capable of attacking American assets. Therefore, the fact that the attack at Benghazi was Al Qaeda needed to be covered up–at least until after the election.

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The More We Learn, The Less It Adds Up

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CBS News is reporting tonight that during the attack on the Embassy in Benghazi, President Obama did not convene the Counterterrorism Security Group, (CSG), the top interagency counterterrorism resource.

The article reports:

“The CSG is the one group that’s supposed to know what resources every agency has. They know of multiple options and have the ability to coordinate counterterrorism assets across all the agencies,” a high-ranking government official told CBS News. “They were not allowed to do their job. They were not called upon.”

The question becomes, “Why weren’t they called?”

The article further reports:

Counterterrorism officials from two agencies said they concluded almost immediately that the attack was by terrorists and was not spontaneous. “I came to this conclusion as soon as I heard the mortar rounds were impacting on top of the building our people were occupying,” says one. “The position of the mortar must be plotted on a map, the target would have to be plotted, computations would be calculated that would result in the proper mortar tube elevation and the correct number of powder bags to be attached to the rounds.”

We have no way of knowing whether President Obama, who has no prior military experience, would have understood that mortar rounds are not part of a spontaneous attack. That is why it is up to a President to have people close to him who know these things. By not calling in the CSG, he was depending on his own limited knowledge rather than bringing in the experts. I don’t know if the four Americans in Benghazi would be alive if this had been handled differently, but I do know that the people who would have immediately understood the situation and been able to evaluate correctly what was happening were left out of the loop.

Had the CSG been called in immediately, I doubt we would have had to listen to Susan Rice tell us on five Sunday shows that this was simply a demonstration that got out of hand.

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“The Facts Are Simple, They Are Known, They Are Available; The Only Thing That Remains Is To Disclose Them

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“The facts are simple, they are known, they are available; the only thing that remains is to disclose them.” That is a direct quote from an interview with former Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line yesterday posted an article about Benghazi that included that quote. The article also included the video below:

The article reminds us:

…former Attorney General Michael Mukasey lays out with great clarity the case that the Obama administration has been incompetent and dishonest when it comes to the Benghazi attack. This is true, he says, of the lead-up to the events of September 11 (when protection was denied the consulate in spite of previous attacks against the Brits and the Red Cross), the events themselves (when our people were told to stand down), and the aftermath (when the White House tried to push a “cock-and-bull” story about the video).

When analyzing Benghazi and whether of not it should impact our vote next week, we need to remember the lies we were told immediately after the attack. The fact that Susan Rice was sent to five Sunday shows to tell us that a video was responsible for the death of four Americans is disgraceful. There is no way that cannot be seen as an attempt to cover-up the fact that the dangers to the Embassy were known and ignored and the cries for help from those in the Embassy during the attack were ignored. Al Qaeda is not on the run, and the war in terror is not over. These are the facts, and all the blaming of the events in Benghazi on a video does not change those facts.

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One Aspect Of Last Night’s Debate

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Commentary Magazine posted a story today about the comments on Libya in last night’s debate between President Obama and Governor Romney.

The article quotes the President’s response to the Governor’s comments on Libya:

And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our U.N. ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive. That’s not what we do. That’s not what I do as president. That’s not what I do as commander in chief.

The article at Commentary Magazine reminds us that the Obama Administration spent two weeks promoting the lie that the attack was the result of a video when they knew that was not the case.

The article reminds us:

We have yet to discover exactly what President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice knew about Libya and when they knew it as well as why the consulate’s requests for security were denied and who made that decision. The president was asked a direct question about that at Hofstra and chose not to answer it.

The article concludes:

Having staked so much on the “bin Laden is dead” theme, the administration dragged its feet when it came to telling the truth about Islamist terrorism in Libya. They repeatedly claimed that the ambassador died as the result of film criticism run amuck. While they claim this was the result of faulty intelligence, there’s no mystery about why they embraced this false narrative so enthusiastically. Talking about an offensive anti-Muslim video (albeit one that virtually no one has actually seen) allowed the president’s foreign policy team to avoid saying the words “terror” and “al-Qaeda.” Instead, they talked about a movie for which they endlessly apologized. The president’s faux outrage notwithstanding, if that isn’t playing politics with security issues and misleading the American public, I don’t know what is.

One of the things that troubles me about the President’s overall conduct after the murder of our Ambassador in Benghazi was the speed at which he continued his campaign for a second term. I think it was rather calloused of him to jet off to Las Vegas before the dust had cleared on the attack of the Embassy. That was not politicizing the event–that was ignoring it.

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