Within Minutes of Benghazi Attack, Barack Obama Was Informed By Top Military Men It Was a "Terrorist Attack" and not a Spontaneous Protest or Exercise in Freeform Film Criticism

Actually that headline is slightly deceptive, because we only know the top military men about to meet with Barack Obama were told Benghazi was a "terrorist attack." And we probably don't have proof of that because of a corrupt invocation of Executive Privilege.

However, it defies reason to imagine that General Ham and the rest of them were told it was a "terrorist attack" but then immediately told Obama it was a spontaneous protest.

And yet the Administration began claiming the next morning that it was a spontaneous protest in which spontaneous participants happened to bring spontaneous mortars with spontaneously pre-ranged firing solutions.

Minutes after the American consulate in Benghazi came under assault on Sept. 11, 2012, the nation's top civilian and uniformed defense officials -- headed for a previously scheduled Oval Office session with President Obama -- were informed that the event was a "terrorist attack," declassified documents show. The new evidence raises the question of why the top military men, one of whom was a member of the president's Cabinet, allowed him and other senior Obama administration officials to press a false narrative of the Benghazi attacks for two weeks afterward.

Gen. Carter Ham, who at the time was head of AFRICOM, the Defense Department combatant command with jurisdiction over Libya, told the House in classified testimony last year that it was him [sic] who broke the news about the unfolding situation in Benghazi to then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The tense briefing -- in which it was already known that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens had been targeted and had gone missing -- occurred just before the two senior officials departed the Pentagon for their session with the commander in chief.

...

"My first call was to General Dempsey, General Dempsey's office, to say, 'Hey, I am headed down the hall. I need to see him right away,'" Ham told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation on June 26 of last year. "I told him what I knew. We immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary Panetta."

...

Numerous aides to the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly told the public in the weeks following the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans that night -- as Obama's hotly contested bid for re-election was entering its final stretch -- that there was no evidence the killings were the result of a premeditated terrorist attack, but rather were the result of a protest gone awry.

So, was Panetta confused about the nature of the attack, perhaps conveying incorrect information to the President?

Nope:

Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February of last year that it was him who informed the president that "there was an apparent attack going on in Benghazi." "Secretary Panetta, do you believe that unequivocally at that time we knew that this was a terrorist attack?" asked Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. "There was no question in my mind that this was a terrorist attack," Panetta replied.

Senior State Department officials who were in direct, real-time contact with the Americans under assault in Benghazi have also made clear they, too, knew immediately -- from surveillance video and eyewitness accounts -- that the incident was a terrorist attack.

Obama has conceded the story was false. However, he and his defenders (by which I mean chiefly the media) insist that the false story was not a lie. They claim that they had legitimate reasons to believe a false story themselves.

And yet nowhere in the record to we ever see any informed party offering up this false story. It seems cooked up entirely out of Hillary Clinton's office.

posted by Ace at 04:44 PM

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