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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