Cable on US Ambassador's dying day cited security concerns, that Libyans guarding Benghazi Consulate had threatened to quit over Obama support of prime minister candidate they disliked, no mention of video

10/9/12, "Obama’s foreign policy narrative unravels," NY Daily News commentary, James Kirchick

"The failure to tell the truth about what happened in Benghazi is a stain on the President's record."

"On Sept. 11, the day he was killed in what we now know was an assassination deliberately planned to coincide with the terrorist attacks 11 years earlier, Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens approved a cable to the State Department warning about the deteriorating security situation in the Libyan city of Benghazi. The dispatch noted that the leaders of two militias, some of whose members were tasked with protecting the American consulate, had threatened to quit, in protest of alleged American support for a prime ministerial candidate they did not like.

Two things stand out about the cable, obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake. The first is that there is no mention of the 14-minute online video, “Innocence of Muslims,
” which the administration — in league with a global army of apologists for religiously-inspired violence — blamed for a tide of anti-American protests that swept Muslim countries last month. The second curiosity is that the U.S. was subcontracting the security of its diplomats and property to Libyan militias.

Anyone who’s visited an American embassy anywhere in the world will know that much of the basic security is provided by locals employed by the U.S. government. But such practices vary depending upon the danger of the post. The American consulate in Benghazi is not the American embassy in Berlin; Washington can rest assured that the German police will provide dependable security in a way that, say, Libyan tribesmen will not.

The failure to protect the Benghazi consulate — all the more disconcerting in the wake of revelations that militants bombed it twice in the five months leading up to Stevens’ murder, warned about further attacks on Facebook, and that Stevens may have been worried that he was on Al Qaeda’s “hit list” — can partly be blamed on the bureaucratic incompetence that’s a feature of any government. But what makes the latest revelations significant is how they are symptomatic of an Obama administration narrative starkly at odds with reality.

When riots spread across the Muslim world last month, the administration desperately wanted to believe that the global outpouring of anti-American rage had absolutely nothing to do with the United States or its policies, and was really just a reaction to a crude movie posted on the internet. President Obama, by dint of his personal background and mere “face,” as pundit Andrew Sullivan once predicted, was supposed to fundamentally change the way Muslims see the U.S.

And so, on Sept. 14, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney asserted that the protests were not a response “to United States policy” or “the administration, or the American people,” but “in response to a video — a film — that we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting.” Carney repeated this line all the way up to Sept. 18, insisting that there existed “no evidence to back up claims by others that this was a preplanned or premeditated attack.”

If this story seemed unbelievable at the outset, we now know that it is, thanks to numerous officials who approached Lake and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to say that the administration knew within 24 hours of the attack that its assertions of a random, “spontaneous” murder of an American ambassador were false. We now know that the assassination was well-planned in advance.

A charitable explanation for various administration officials’ misleading statements is that they were motivated by the CIA “talking points” delivered to them in the aftermath of the attack. These initial memos reported, for instance, that the protests in Benghazi were “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo,” also allegedly begun in response to the YouTube video. But the possibility of Al Qaeda carrying out the premeditated murder of an ambassador, and mixing in with a “spontaneous” protest as a disguise, are not mutually exclusive. As one intelligence officer told Lake, the administration’s selective use of intelligence information amounted to “cherry picking.”

You might have thought that it was only Bush administration officials who “cherry picked” intelligence. But what this administration’s bungled response to the Benghazi tragedy illustrates is that the triumph of ideology over reality is not limited to one particular party.

Time and again, the administration has seen what it has wanted to see. Eliminating suspected terrorists (and, potentially, random innocents around them) with Hellfire missiles — rather than sending them to Guantanamo Bay -- demonstrates “fidelity to our values.”... And because Obama, with American allies, liberated Libya, saving Benghazi from all but certain genocide, there was little reason to be concerned about the safety of American diplomats.

Many believed that electing Barack Obama as President would be the tonic America needed after eight unpopular years of the Bush administration. This was always a chimera, and the tragedy of Benghazi is but the latest rude awakening."

"Kirchick is a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies." 

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10/8/12, "Exclusive: Libya Cable Detailed Threats," Eli Lake, Daily Beast

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