What the GOP should stand for: Opportunity

By Ted Cruz
Since Election Day, much energy has been spent analyzing why Republicans did so poorly. Many have urged that Republicans must “moderate their views,” by which they mean we should adopt more policies of Democrats.

Mr. Boehner, Ohio Republican, told reporters on Capitol Hill that the administration now has a chance to clear up some of the lingering questions about when it learned that the attack was indeed “conducted by Islamic terrorists.”

At issue is the extent to which electoral politics may have motivated White House officials to strip any mention of al Qaeda or terrorism from unclassified “talking points” about who the administration thought was behind the Sept. 11 attack.

The talking points were given to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan E. Rice, who appeared on several Sunday talk shows Sept. 16 — five days after the Benghazi attack. Mrs. Rice characterized the incident as a spontaneous assault that had grown out of a protest against a U.S.-made video denigrating Islam.

Although the talking points have been discussed extensively over the past eight months, one exchange during a dramatic hearing Wednesday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee appears to have triggered a new wave of interest.

http://minutemennews.com/2013/05/boehner-sees-proof-of-benghazi-cover-up-in-obama-administration-emails/

But let someone else try to stand up against Obama’s crime syndicate and he’s the first one to start hollering treason.

It seems that a growing number of state governors are re-establishing State Defense Forces, also known as State Guards, State Military Reserves and State Militias. These forces are under the direct authority of the governor of the state and are not subject to federal control. They can be readily deployed in the case of any natural or man-made disasters.

As of 2010, 23 states and territories have organized State Defense Forces (SDFs) with approximately 14,000 people serving in them. SDFs were established by federal and state law at the very beginning of our country’s history. They have played important roles over the years in helping to defend our nation, however, due to many state budget deficits, SDFs are becoming a thing of the past.

The Heritage Foundation did a report on State Defense Forces back in 2010 and if you want to read more about their history, please click here.

According to a recent report, 14 governors have been working to reinstate SDFs in their states. Governors Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Rick Perry of Texas have been fronting the drive to get more states to re-establish their STFs.

The report goes on to say that each of the 14 governors have now supposedly received National Security Letters from the Obama administration demanding that they halt the formation of their SDFs or face possible charges of treason. It seems that since Obama has drastically reduced the size of the military and their forces are stretched thin with troops still in Afghanistan and Iraq, that he is fearing rebellion from the states. Further evidence of his fear of a rebellion or revolution is the fact that he has nationalized all of the state National Guard units.

Read more: http://godfatherpolitics.com/

McConnell demands White House investigate IRS…

Mark Mardell, the BBC’s North American editor, issued a mea culpa of sorts today after Jonathan Karl at ABC News dropped his bombshell that proves beyond any doubt that the Obama Administration lied about its involvement in editing the CIA’s talking points surrounding the September 11 attack on our consulate in Libya.

In a piece titled, “After Benghazi revelations, heads will roll,” Mardell writes, “In the interests of full disclosure I have to say I have not in the past been persuaded that allegations of a cover-up were a big deal.” He adds, “It seemed to me a partisan attack based on very little.”
That all changed with today’s revelations. Mardell now believes:

This is the first hard evidence that the state department did ask for changes to the CIA’s original assessment.

Specifically, they wanted references to previous warnings deleted and this sentence removed: “We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.”

There’s little doubt in my mind that this will haunt Hillary Clinton if she decides to run for president, unless she executes some pretty fancy footwork.

State department spokesperson Victoria Nuland is directly implicated, and the fingerprints of senior White House aides Ben Rhodes and Jay Carney are there as well.

If the rest of the mainstream media shows the integrity Mr. Mardell just did, the Obama Administration is about to finally be held accountable for an unforgivable coverup that started back in September and has lasted straight through to today.

Big hat tip to @RaganEwing.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/05/10/BBC-issues-Mea-Culpa-Benghazi-Libya-Matters

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/05/09/as_libs_dismiss_the_whisteblower_s_yarn_on_benghazi_we_ask_where_was_obama

Conservative ideas need a new message

By Jim DeMint
The U.S. Senate reached an all-time low — a hard mark to achieve — last week as I said my goodbyes to rejoin the real world. The “fiscal cliff” theatrics ended with a predictable non-solution that raised taxes on all U.S. workers and added more weight to the millstone the federal government has hung around our necks.

Putting Heritage in DeMint Condition
Former Senator goes Mobile with his message.
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/10/putting-heritage-in-demint-con

I still ask myself, why any conservative would support the dope known as Juan Williams after NPR dumped his useless ass. I’ve really got to give Michelle Malkin credit for holding back her outrage. If I had been in her same position, I probably would have lost it on Williams.

Only the left could politicize Benghazi the way they do. All I want to do is find out who screwed up what, and if there was a cover up. Four Americans were killed by Muslim terrorists, and we were fed lies from Obama, Hillary Clinton and the media about the attack being from some lame Youtube video.

Can’t Democrats for once in their lives put aside the politics of trying to protect Obama and Hillary Clinton and actually work with Republicans to find out what went wrong and where? Or is that too much to ask?

Video here … http://www.fireandreamitchell.com/2013/05/09/michelle-malkin-torches-juan-williams-again-over-benghazi/?utm_source=exposeLIBTARDS&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FireAndreaMitchell+(Fire+Andrea+Mitchell!+Exposing+Liberal+bias+cause+the+MSM+doesn’t+have+to.)

At the top of his second hour, Limbaugh explained why he had not yet featured on the show by saying he thought his listeners had already been made aware of all the details of the hearing.

“Those of you who listen to this program know exactly what happened in Benghazi, and you know exactly why the White House didn’t want anyone to know about it,” Limbaugh said. “There’s just one remaining question that I have been asking for weeks; no, I’ve been asking this question for months. Where was Obama during all of it? That’s the one thing that nobody knows. Where was Obama when four Americans were under assault and ultimately being killed? And there doesn’t seem to be any curiosity inside official Washington.”

He also said that the media has already dismissed the news as nothing more than a “political effort,” despite widespread coverage in the top newspapers.

“The media is treating it today as a non-event or as a Republican political effort to embarrass our delightful president and our future president, Hillary Clinton,” he said.

Perhaps one of the more surprising elements of Limbaugh’s analysis was his suggestion that the Obama administration has gotten away with a cover-up.

“Now for everybody that had their hopes up that this was going to mean something, I warned you,” he said. “If the media doesn’t get behind this and if it only lasts one day, it’s going to come and go and become a non-event. And the Republicans basically launched everything they had in one day, and that’s it. And so now, the media is spinning it as a Republican political effort that failed. The whistle-blowers — you heard them, you heard them choking up and crying. You heard their testimony.”

“We played it yesterday, and I’m sure if you watched some cable news last night, you got snippets of it,” he continued. “You saw the pain, the tears, the choke-up, the suffering, the disbelief, the incredulity when they were told this was the result of a video. Basically in this audience, you know what the truth was or is, and you also know the administration has gotten away with it. Now it’s old news. They have gotten away with the cover-up. They have gotten away with mischaracterizing it. They’ve gotten away with spinning it as another failed, inept Republican political effort.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/09/rush-on-benghazi-administration-has-gotten-away-with-it-video/#ixzz2SqyunUHf

After An Emotional Hearing, Obama And Clinton Face New Questions On Their Response To Benghazi

WHEN WILL OBAMA AND CLINTON ANSWER THE CONCERNS RAISED BY THE BENGHAZI WHISTLEBLOWERS?

The Hill Headline: “Whistle Blown On Benghazi.” (Jordy Yager, “Whistle Blown On Benghazi,” The Hill, 5/8/13)

• Whistleblowers “Offered Stark Criticism Of The Administration’s Handling Of The Terrorist Attack On The U.S. Consulate In Benghazi, Libya.”“Government whistle-blowers on Wednesday choked back tears as they offered stark criticism of the administration’s handling of the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.” (Jordy Yager, “Whistle Blown On Benghazi,” The Hill, 5/8/13)

CNN Headline: “State Department Failed To Understand Dangerous Situation In Benghazi.” (CNN’s The Lead, 5/8/13)

• The Whistleblowers “Raised Fresh Questions About Whether Then-Secretary Of State Hillary Rodham Clinton And Her Deputies Were Sufficiently Engaged” In The Security Of The Benghazi Compound. “But in expanding the narrative of the intensely politicized episode, the witnesses raised fresh questions about whether then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her deputies were sufficiently engaged in assessing the security posture of diplomatic posts last year.” (Ernesto Londono and Karen DeYoung, “At Benghazi Hearing, State Dept. Officials Challenge Administration Review Of Attacks,” The Washington Post, 5/8/13)

Witnesses Described How “The Obama Administration’s Initial Reluctance To Describe The Attacks As Premeditated Terrorist Acts” Had “Hindered The FBI’s Probe Into The Death Of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens And Three Other Americans.”“Speaking before the Republican-led congressional panel, they also reiterated criticism of the Obama administration’s initial reluctance to describe the attacks as premeditated terrorist acts. The move hindered the FBI’s probe into the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, the former deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Libya charged.” (Ernesto Londono and Karen DeYoung, “At Benghazi Hearing, State Dept. Officials Challenge Administration Review Of Attacks,” The Washington Post, 5/8/13)

TO WHAT EXTENT DID POLITICS INFLUENCE THE ADMINISTRATION’S “INACCURATE, IRRESPONSIBLE” RESPONSE?

The Wall Street Journal: The Obama Administration “Knew In September They Had A Politically Potent Debacle On Their Hands And Did Their Best To Delay And Obfuscate Any Accounting.” “The immediate press spin on Wednesday’s hearing is that there was no “smoking gun” proof of a cover-up, as if that is the only reason to find out what happened. It’s clear enough already that senior Administration officials knew in September they had a politically potent debacle on their hands and did their best to delay and obfuscate any accounting. All of this warrants further investigation, and such oversight is part of Congress’s job.” (Editorial, “The Benghazi Awakening,” The Wall Street Journal, 5/8/13)

National Journal’s Ron Fournier: Obama Administration Response To Benghazi Was “Inaccurate, Irresponsible And Shrouded By Campaign-Style Spin.” “The administration’s response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on U.S. installations in eastern Libya was inaccurate, irresponsible and shrouded by campaign-style spin. It belied President Obama’s oft-broken promise to run a transparent government.” (Ron Fournier, “Why Benghazi Is A Blow To Obama And Clinton,” National Journal, 5/9/13)

• “Benghazi Is A Blow To The Credibility Of The President And His Potential Successor, Then-Secretary Of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.” “If nothing else, Benghazi is a blow to the credibility of the president and his potential successor, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. This could be big.” (Ron Fournier, “Why Benghazi Is A Blow To Obama And Clinton,” National Journal, 5/9/13)

WAS A BENGHAZI WHISTLEBLOWER PUNISHED FOR ASKING QUESTIONS?

Was Clinton Lawyer Cheryl Mills Involved In Shutting Down Questions From The Former Deputy Chief Of Mission In Libya?

A Benghazi Whistleblower Charged That Clinton’s Key State Department Lieutenant “Made A Concerted Effort To Block Him From Meeting With A Congressional Delegation.” “Clinton — how much she knew, when she knew it, and whether she willingly participated in a cover up — was a central theme of the hearing. And Wednesday, the story did move a large step closer to Clinton. Star witness Gregory Hicks, who was the Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya the night of the attack, charged that Clinton’s key State Department lieutenant and longtime family retainer, Cheryl Mills, made a concerted effort to block him from meeting with a Congressional delegation and that he had never been interviewed by the FBI in connection to the attack. Hicks said that he had been demoted after asking too many questions of his superiors about their response to Benghazi.” (Rosie Gray, “Benghazi Investigation Creeps Closer To Hillary Clinton,” BuzzFeed, 5/9/13)

• Hicks Testified That He Was “Punished By Senior U.S. Officials For Questioning Rice’s Comments,” And Contacted By Cheryl Mills, A “Close Confidante To Clinton,” After He Met With House Investigators Without A State Department Lawyer Present. “Hicks provided compelling testimony that he was punished by senior U.S. officials for questioning Rice’s comments and also for agreeing to an interview with House investigators without a State Department lawyer present. (Hicks said the lawyer did not have the proper security clearance.) He described a phone call by an ‘upset’ Cheryl Mills, State Department chief of staff and close confidante to Clinton, concerning his meeting without the lawyer. And he said that when complained about Rice’s statement, asking ‘why she had said there was a demonstration, when we had reported that there was an attack,’ Jones curtly gave him the sense ‘that I needed to stop the line of questioning.’” (Glenn Kessler, “The Benghazi Hearings: What’s New And What’s Not,” The Washington Post‘s The Fact Checker, 5/9/13)

“If Hicks Is To Be Believed, Issuing A No-Communications Order Is An Inherently Political Act And, By Definition, A Blow For Transparency.” “Hicks’ emotional testimony Wednesday accused the administration of political machinations and bullying. Hicks told lawmakers that he was ordered not to talk to members of Congress about the attack. When he did so anyhow, and a State Department lawyer was excluded from the meeting because he lacked the necessary security clearance, Hicks said he received an angry phone call from Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff. Mills is well-respected and known for her fierce loyalty to Clinton. If Hicks is to be believed, issuing a no-communications order is an inherently political act and, by definition, a blow for transparency.” (Ron Fournier, “Why Benghazi Is A Blow To Obama And Clinton,” National Journal, 5/9/13)

Hicks’ Description Of The “Internal Dynamics” And “Retaliation” He Faced After Questioning The Administration’s “Public Posture” Following The Attacks Raises New Questions For The Obama Administration. “After that, he said, relations with his superiors went downhill, especially with Jones, who gave him ‘a blistering critique of my management style.’ He eventually returned from Libya and was given a job that he described as a significant demotion. There are obviously two sides to any such exchanges. But Hicks’ description of the internal dynamics — and reported retaliation for questioning the administration’s public posture — is certainly new.” (Glenn Kessler, “The Benghazi Hearings: What’s New And What’s Not,” The Washington Post‘s The Fact Checker, 5/9/13)

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, On The State Department’s Response To Hicks’ Testimony: “This Doesn’t Pass A Sniff Test.” MSNBC’s JOE SCARBOROUGH: “Wow. Donny, this doesn’t pass a sniff test. You know what we are about to get into? We are about to get into some very dangerous territory for the administration. They demote this guy and now they are doing what we have seen too often, where you try to now call him a liar? Are they saying he doesn’t remember? I don’t think this guy will forget the events of September 11th and beyond for the rest of his life.” (MSNBC’s “,” 5/9/13)

• MSNBC’s Donny Deutsche: “This Clearly Has A Yuck Factor.” DONNY DEUTSCHE: “You started the day going, ok, this is going to be a Republican political circus and you ended the day with going yuck. This clearly has a yuck factor. The big question for this country in 2016: does it have the sticky factor for Hillary Clinton?” (MSNBC’s “,” 5/9/13)

http://www.gop.com/news/research/obamas-benghazi-blunders-continue/

What Do You Know? Hillary Got An Award, Too!

On Tuesday night, the eve of the House hearing on Benghazi, the liberal Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies honored UN Ambassador, Susan Rice with a “Great American” award.

On Wednesday night, it was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s turn to be feted, as she accepted an award from the Pacific Council in International Policyfor her public service at a Beverly Hills gala. Standing outside the Beverly Wilshire hotel were activists from the “Ready for Hillary 2016″ organization.

The award, named after Warren Christopher, honors “the public service of others whose work reflects his distinctive leadership qualities,” according to the Pacific Council, which calls itself “the premier international affairs organization focused on policy issues of special resonance to the West Coast”.

At the House hearing on Benghazi, Wednesday, Gregory Hicks, the former Deputy Chief of Mission/Chargé d’Affairs in Libya (who has since been demoted) testified that Clinton had called him around 2 a.m. from Washington to ask “what was going on.” Hicks had told her that the consulate was under attack. He never mentioned a spontaneous protest outside the consulate because there wasn’t one. He also testified that he had already alerted State that the consulate was under a terrorist attack before he had talked to Clinton.

The next day, Clinton’s distinctive leadership qualities were on display at the ceremony marking the return to the United States of the remains of the four Americans killed in Benghazi. Standing in front of the flag draped coffins,she blamed a YouTube video for sparking a spontaneous demonstration.

“We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with. It is hard for the American people to make sense of that, because it is senseless and totally unacceptable.”
Hillary was filled with a fierce resolve to bring Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the creator of the offending video to justice.

Charles Woods, the father of a Navy SEAL killed in Benghazi, said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told him when his son’s body returned to Andrews Air Force Base: “We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”

Lo and behold, Nakoula was brought in for questioning by five Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies at midnight, eventually arrested and held without bond, and finally thrown into jail for a year. He sits in La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution in Texas right now, even as the deceptive spin that blamed his video for the Benghazi attack looks more egregious by the day.

Clinton has yet to state definitively whether or not she plans to run for president in 2016.

http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/05/09/What-Do-You-Know-Hillary-Got-An-Award-Too

So today, the House Oversight Committee tried to find out exactly who screwed up and why. At least some of the Congress people did. A few committee members used their time to protect the Obama administration, people like Carolyn Maloney and Eleanor Norton did that.

There are three major areas of concern for those who want to know the truth. First, why did the White House not deploy a rapid security team when all hell broke loose in Benghazi? State Department official Mark Thompson, a counter terrorism expert testified this way.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

THOMPSON: I alerted my leadership, indicating that we needed to go forward and consider the deployment of the foreign emergency support team. I wanted that considered, I — I notified the White House of my idea. They indicated that meetings had already taken place that evening that had taken (inaudible) out of the menu of options.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’REILLY: Thompson went on to say he was not told why the emergency support team was not deployed. The next area of concern is why Ambassador Susan Rice mislead the world shortly after the murders when she said a provocative anti-Muslim video could have ignited a spontaneous attack on the Americans.

The second in command in Libya, State Department official Gregory Hicks took on that question.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOWDY: When Ambassador Stevens talked to you, perhaps minutes before he died, as a dying declaration, what precisely did he say to you?

HICKS: He said, “Greg, we’re under attack.”

GOWDY: Did he mention one word about a protest or a demonstration?

HICKS: No, sir, he did not.

GOWDY: So fast forward, Mr. Hicks, to the Sunday talk shows and Ambassador Susan Rice, she blamed this attack on a video. In fact, she did it five different times. What was your reaction to that?

HICKS: I was stunned. My jaw dropped. And I was embarrassed.

GOWDY: Did she talk to you before she went on the five Sunday talk shows?

HICKS: No, sir.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’REILLY: Mr. Hicks was in Tripoli during the attacks and says he felt powerless to help the Ambassador.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HICKS: I asked the Defense Attache who had been talking with AfriCom and with the Joint Staff. Is anything coming, will they be sending us any help? Is there something out there? And he answered that, the nearest help was in Aviano. The nearest where there were fighter planes. He said that it will take two to three hours for them to get on site but that there also were no tankers available for them to refuel.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’REILLY: Aviano was in Italy where America has an Air Base.

The third and perhaps the most important question going forward was President Obama and/or Hillary Clinton at fault in the Benghazi debacle?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. DARRELL ISSA (R-CA), CHAIRMAN, HOUSE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE: Mr. Hicks, 2:00in the morning, Secretary of State calls you personally, not a common call.

HICKS: No, sir.

ISSA: Did she ask you about the cause of the attack? Did she ask — ask about videos? Did she ask about anything at all that would have allowed you to answer the question of how Benghazi came to be attacked as far as you know?

HICKS: I don’t recall that being part of the conversation.

ISSA: So she wasn’t interested in the cause of the attack and this was the only time you talked directly to the Secretary where you could have told her or not told her about the cause of the attack?

HICKS: It was — yes. That was the only time when I could have.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’REILLY: Now, because of Ambassador Rice’s subsequent testimony and the allegation that Secretary Clinton did not aggressively seek the truth about the attack becomes important. The witnesses today were compelling but they are not at the level where they could level direct charges against the President or even Secretary Clinton.

Also Mr. Obama was barely mentioned in the Q and A. His role remains largely undefined and is likely to stay that way. It’s very difficult to pin down the President of the United States without subpoena powers. And those are not likely to be granted in this investigation unless more evidence surfaces.

So we, the people, are left with the facts. U.S. government did not protect its people in Libya the way it should have. It was not forthcoming about who launched the attack. And it has not brought the killers to justice. The Benghazi incident is a tragic embarrassment to this country and speaks to the failure of leadership in the State Department and in the White House. At the level in the White House? I’m not sure. But certainly the White House was involved.

There is no way Ambassador Susan Rice should have been allowed to mislead the world. If you don’t know Ambassador, don’t say anything. If you are not sure, keep quiet. The simple truth is that the Republicans want to know the whole story because it embarrasses the Democrats. And the Democrats don’t want to know the whole story because it helps the Republicans. But the folks should know what happened there, especially the families of the murdered Americans. I believe there will be more to come on the Benghazi chaos.

And that’s “The Memo.”

– You can catch Bill O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” weeknights at 8 and oreilly.

Boehner Calls On Obama To Release Benghazi Emails

Email
Speaker of the House John Boehner called on President Obama on Thursday to release unclassified emails sent between State Department officials describing the attacks in Benghazi as terrorist attacks. He went on to ask that the administration reject the talking point that only “stylistic changes” were made to Ambassador Susan Rice’s talking points before she appeared on Sunday Shows following the attack.
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/05/09/Boehner-Calls-on-Obama-to-Release-Benghazi-Emails

http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/09/cruz-obama-could-learn-about-job-creation-from-texas/#ixzz2SoePfS00

Democratic pollster and author Doug Schoen tells Newsmax TV that the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi is likely to follow former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton into the 2016 presidential race should she decide to make another run for the White House.

Speaking in an exclusive interview on Wednesday, Schoen said that Wednesday’s Congressional hearing into the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans perished, has only raised more questions.

“This is still a work in progress,” he explained. “Look, the hearing today raises more questions about what happened, why a force was not sent in to try to rescue the ambassador and his colleagues.”

“I would be very surprised if other candidates — certainly Republicans — didn’t raise it,” predicted Schoen. “Again, there have been questions about the performance of the State Department. She, herself, has acknowledged that she as secretary of state has ultimate responsibility for what goes on.”

“We still have unanswered questions about what the president knew, when he knew it, what he was doing,” according to Schoen. “So, we are really still in the middle of a drama that’s playing itself out.”

http://www.newsmax.com/newswidget/schoen-hillary-benghazi-attack/2013/05/08/id/503548?promo_code=11550-1&utm_source=11550Breitbart&utm_medium=nmwidget&utm_campaign=widgetphase1

From Bimbos to Benghazi
Benghazi whistleblowers as the new Clinton “bimbo
eruptions.”
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/09/from-bimbos-to-benghazi

THE-TRUTH-IS-OUT-THERE (Obama Files)

The Candy-Obama Controversy: ‘Get the Transcript’
http://spectator.org/blog/2012/10/18/the-candy-obama-controversy-ge

THE-TRUTH-IS-OUT-THERE (Obama Files)

THE-TRUTH-IS-OUT-THERE (Obama Files)

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/benghazi_consulates_3_am_phone_call.html#.UYuYT7_IUy4.email

President Obama’s press secretary on the middle-class jobs tour: Why visit Texas? Why not?

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says the president is traveling to Texas tomorrow because while there’s lots of gridlock and partisan infighting in Washington, the Lone Star State is home to the kind of economic growth Obama wants to highlight. President Obama will tour a high-tech high school and a chip-machine manufacturer near Austin on Thursday. So, why Texas, where Rick Perry credits Republicans for the state’s economic success?

MR. CARNEY: Well, why not Texas? Austin is a hub of innovation and technology. It’s also a hub of education. And the President, as you know, will have a series of events tomorrow that reflect these three areas that he’s talked about since the State of the Union — the need to make sure that we have these kinds of jobs of the future here in the United States, the need to ensure that our workers have the skills they need to fill those jobs, and the necessity that those jobs pay well enough to sustain a middle-class life. And Austin is a great place to go for that.

Some words you’re likely to hear tomorrow in Texas: middle class, economic opportunity, education, jobs.

Some words you won’t hear: Battleground Texas, an effort by several Obama campaign veterans to relocate in the state and begin a project aimed at turning reliably Republican Texas blue. Said Carney: “People sometimes in Washington see everything through an electoral lens are true, but I can guarantee you that is not what this is about.”

http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2013/05/president-obamas-press-secretary-on-the-middle-class-jobs-tour-why-visit-texas-why-not.html/

Ralph Peters On Benghazi: Obama Admin Makes “Nigerian Phone Scammers Look Like Paragons Of Integrity”

RELATED VIDEOS | expand

Lt. Col. Ralph Peters says the Obama administration went into “panic mode” after the terror attack in Benghazi and “put politics above the security of our diplomatic personnel.”

“They make Nigerian phone scammers look like paragons of integrity,” Peters added.

“I personally believe it would have been very difficult, if not impossible to save those four lives, especially the ambassador because of the timelines. But we should have tried. When people are under fire you don’t sit back and say, ‘Well, gee, I hope the smoke blows over,'” Lt. Col. Peters said on “FOX & Friends” this morning.

“The Obama administration’s case was cowardly, duplicitous and they sacrificed American lives for politics. And the American people need to understand that, despite the fact that the establishment media would cover for Obama no matter what he did,” Peters told host Brian Kilmeade.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/05/08/lt_col_ralph_peters_on_benghazi_obama_admin_makes_nigerian_phone_scammers_look_like_paragons_of_integrity.html

Soon after the testimony, Democratic office-holders took to the airwaves and the internet to assure liberal loyalists that there was nothing really “new” here. Republicans, by contrast, trumpeted the accounts of Gregory Hicks, Eric Nordstrom, and Mark Thompson before the House Oversight Committee as proof that the administration never told the truth about Libya.

Interestingly, both sides are mostly right. Americans who have followed this incident closely didn’t learn much that they hadn’t already suspected about the sacking of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the murder of four Americans, and the administration’s extraordinary efforts to deflect any accountability for the tragedy by stonewalling, stalling, and issuing a series of misleading assertions about the sequence of events. Yet in hearing directly from Hicks, who was the deputy to slain ambassador Christopher Stevens, Americans can now put a face to that coverup.

Hicks, the second highest ranking State Department official in Libya when the consulate was attacked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, confirmed the following facts under oath: There were no protests outside the U.S. compound; the anti-Islamic YouTube video denounced by the administration was a “non-event” in Libya and had nothing whatsoever to do with the assault that night; Hicks’ team knew almost immediately that the attack was carried out by terrorists; and all of this information was relayed to Washington in the hours and days afterward.

Hicks is a decorated, 22-year civil service veteran, so his testimony is not easily dismissed. More importantly, it throws into stark relief the actions and public statements of the administration in the aftermath of the attack.

Here is what we know:

– On Friday, Sept. 14, at a ceremony receiving the remains of the four slain Americans, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mentioned the video as a proximate cause of the assault and suggested a “mob” was behind the “violent acts.”

– On Saturday, Sept. 15, talking points drafted by the intelligence community were heavily edited by officials in the White House and State Department, striking passages saying that the latter had been warned of threats in the region, references to other al-Qaeda-linked attacks in Benghazi, and the suggestion that al-Qaeda-linked extremists may have participated in the attack.

– On Sunday, Sept. 16, U.N Ambassador Susan Rice now famously went on all five Sunday news shows and claimed the attack stemmed from violent protests inspired by the video. More than a month later she acknowledged no such protests took place.

– In the two weeks following the incident, President Obama himself singled out the video as a contributing factor to the attack on four separate occasions (Sept. 18 on “Late Show With David Letterman”; Sept. 20 during a forum with Univision; and twice on Sept. 25, once on the daytime talk show “The View” and again that afternoon at his speech before the United Nations General Assembly).

We also know that members of the administration went to great lengths to avoid calling the Benghazi episode a terrorist act. Despite Obama’s claim during the second presidential debate that he had called the assault an “act of terror” in a Rose Garden statement the day after it happened (a claim famously supported by moderator Candy Crowley), the truth is that the president used the phrase that day in a generic sense.

It took eight days for White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and Clinton to label the attack an act of terror. Obama was given opportunities to do the same during his Sept. 20/25 television appearances, but he declined.

We did learn at least two new, relevant facts from yesterday’s testimony. One is that Beth Jones, an official in the State Department, sent an email on September 12 bluntly acknowledging terrorists participated in the attacks (“The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.”) The other is that Hicks said his “jaw dropped” when he heard Rice make her claims about spontaneous protests. Hicks testified that he later confronted her about the comments, and shortly thereafter he was demoted.

So, while we may not have been treated to any “bombshell” revelations Wednesday, the testimony of Thompson, Hicks and Nordstrom and a fair reading of the record leads to an obvious conclusion: The president and his administration clearly misled the public about what happened on Sept. 11, 2012.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/09/a_coverup_laid_bare_118335.html#ixzz2SnRPfC5m

Transcript of Greg Hick’s testimony here.

http://www.thetowntalk.com/article/20130508/NEWS01/130508017/Transcript-Testimony-Gregory-Hicks-Benghazi?nclick_check=1

Spokes-Weasel Carney:
Benghazi Happened A Long Time Ago

Clinton:
What difference does it make?

Dem. Congressman at Benghazi Hearing:
Death Is a Part of Life

Dem Congressman
Blames Budget Cuts

Cummings on
Funding for Embassy Security

Benghazi Witness Says State Dept.
Told Him Not To Meet With Congress

Mother of Benghazi victim
I blame Hillary

• Mark Thompson, an official with the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau.
• Greg Hicks, deputy chief of mission in Libya who became top U.S. diplomat in the country after Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in the terror attack.
• Eric Nordstrom, a diplomatic security officer who was formerly the regional security officer in Libya.
• Their testimonies confirmed what we already knew in the days after the horrible attack on Sept. 11, 2011, against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which took the lives of four Americans: U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, State Department worker Sean Smith, and former U.S. Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.

  As Jerry of Political War Zone pointed out,Benghazigate is far worse than Nixon’s Watergate for this simple reason: No one died in Watergate, but four Americans, including an ambassador, were killed in Benghazigate.

  This is a summary of their testimonies today:

  1. Obama regime lied: The Obama regime (Secretary of State Hillary “what difference does it make?” Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, and Obama the POS) lied about the nature of the Benghazi attack, calling it a spontaneous protest by Muslim masses against an anti-Muslim video made by a California man. According to Greg Hicks, “everybody in the mission” believed it was an act of terror “from the get-go.” Hicks also said he had briefed Clinton that night, but she continued to blame the video for the attack.

  2. An Islamic terrorist attack: In addition to Hick’s testimony, Rep. Trey Goudy (R-SC) read into the record an email from Beth Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs. The September 12 email—disclosed for the first time today—said Jones had spoken to Libya’s ambassador to Washington who said the attack was the work of former Gadhafi regime loyalists. Jones said she told the ambassador: “The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.”

  3. Failure in security: The U.S. diplomatic buildings in Benghazi did not meet State Department security standards and were listed as “high threat” before the 9/11/2011 attacks. Eric Nordstrom said, “It’s my understanding only the secretary of state could waive those requirements.” In other words, Hillary Clinton is responsible for the lapse in security at Benghazi.

  4. Cover-up: Gregory Hicks testified he was told by the State Department not to speak to members of Congress while they were investigating the details of the Benghazi consulate attacks. State Department lawyers instructed him to avoid an interview with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who traveled to Libya to investigate the attacks: “I was instructed not to allow the RSO, the acting deputy chief of mission and myself to be personally interviewed by Congressman Chaffetz.”

  5. White House knew what was happening as it was happening: Hicks testified that an UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle or drone) was flying in Libya the night of the attack.

  http://beforeitsnews.com/opinion-conservative/2013/05/whistleblowers-confirm-obama-regime-lied-about-the-benghazi-attack-2637464.html

Additionally, Hicks described the difficulty the FBI had in the weeks after the attack reaching Benghazi:

PAUL GOSAR: Let me get the timeline finalized here. So the FBI is sitting in Tripoli for weeks waiting for the approval of the Libyan government to travel to Benghazi. Is that appropriate?

GREGORY HICKS: They were attempting to do their job from Tripoli as best they could.

PAUL GOSAR: But they were denied access into Benghazi, right?

GREGORY HICKS: Correct.

PAUL GOSAR: What were they doing with their time?

GREGORY HICKS: They were interviewing witnesses that they could find in Tripoli and could meet with in Tripoli and they were also engaging with the government in order to develop a cooperative investigation with the Libyans who had sent an investigator to Benghazi.

PAUL GOSAR: Were you interviewed by the FBI?

GREGORY HICKS: No, I was never interviewed by the FBI.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) has speculated the delay that the FBI experienced while they were in Triploi may be attributable to the Obama Administration insulting Libyan President Mohammed Magarief by claiming the Benghazi attack was the result of a protest.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press mischaracterized the Benghazi hearings as merely a Republican event, even though it is an official House committee investigation.

In the headline of its report, the Associated Press downplayed the official hearings of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee–that has both Democrats and Republicans on it–into the failures surrounding the 2012 attacks on our embassy personnel in Benghazi, Libya. The AP characterized the official hearings as “GOP hearings,” making the proceedings seem like a mere political witch-hunt.

The piece written by Donna Cassata was headlined, “GOP Benghazi hearing stokes political controversy.”

The hearing on Benghazi is not a “GOP hearing,” but is instead an official hearing of the House, with representatives of both parties sitting at the head of the proceedings.

The bias in the piece doesn’t begin and end in the headline, either. Cassata inserts her opinion into the description of the day’s events as well.

Her fourth paragraph is a perfect example of that bias (emphasis added).

Nearly eight months later, Republicans continue to investigate despite an exhaustive independent review and hours of testimony from senior administration officials.

Cassata was so insistent that readers get that the GOP is somehow ignoring that “exhaustive independent review” that she had to say it twice in the same article.

The AP writer goes on to use emotionally loaded terms, such as claiming that Republicans are engaging in a “bitter dispute” with Obama and that Hillary Clinton is the “target” of much “conservative wrath.”

The AP report also characterizes the GOP investigation into the death of a U.S. ambassador as just a move to “stoke” controversy in order to keep the matter alive into the 2016 presidential election.

Cassata ends her report firmly characterizing the whole hearing as nothing but a political move by conservatives.

Conservatives who are vital to the GOP in turning out the vote in midterm elections have pressured the party to act forcefully in investigating the Benghazi assault. In the House, more than 130 rank-and-file Republicans have signed onto a resolution calling for Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to create a special select committee to look into the attacks, seeing the latest GOP investigation as less than satisfactory.

To Cassata, House Republicans and “conservatives” are not interested in getting to the truth; the hearing is only a ruse to increase turnout for the 2014 and 2016 elections.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/05/08/AP-Claims-Official-House-Benghazi-Hearings-Just-GOP-Hearing

Mr. Hicks: “They were not authorized to travel. They remained in Tripoli with us. The medic went with the nurse to the hospital to — and his skills to the treatment of and care of our wounded.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah): “How did personnel react to being told to stand down?”

Mr. Hicks: “They were furious, I will quote Lt. Col. Gibson, he said, ‘this is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.'”

VIDEO …
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/05/08/Hicks-The-Diplomats-had-More-Balls-Then-Military

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/05/08/Hicks-The-Diplomats-had-More-Balls-Then-Military

Issa of California, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, also said today at a hearing of the panel that leaders of the State Department’s review board refused to testify before the panel.

Today’s hearing revives efforts by Republicans to show the Obama administration didn’t provide enough security to U.S. diplomats in Libya before the attack last Sept. 11 that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, failed to respond militarily during it and engaged in what Issa has called a “cover-up” afterward to hide the role of terrorists linked to al-Qaeda.

Obama administration officials have rejected all of those characterizations, and Democrats have said Republicans are trying to exploit a tragedy for political gain.

The oversight committee’s top Democrat, Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, said today that the Republicans are trying to “smear” officials in a “full-scale media campaign,” including with false statements that the military was told to stand down rather than sending aid during the attacks.

Cummings said the leaders of the Accountability Review Board named by former Secretary Hillary Clinton to investigate the attacks and the department’s role — Thomas Pickering, a former undersecretary of state, and retired Admiral Michael Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — should be asked to appear in the future.

Witnesses testifying today included Gregory Hicks, the second-ranking U.S. diplomat in Libya at the time of the attack.

In an excerpt released by the committee this week, he told House investigators he tried in vain to get fighter jets to fly over Benghazi to scare off the attackers. He also said four U.S. special forces troops were ordered not to board a Libyan military transport plane that flew to Benghazi from Tripoli in the hours after the attack.

“A fast-mover flying over Benghazi at some point, you know, as soon as possible might very well have prevented some of the bad things that happened that night,” Hicks said.

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified last year troops were mobilized to prepare a response, though the military assets weren’t close enough to reach Benghazi in time. He said the Pentagon “spared no expense to save American lives.”

Hicks also said he knew from the outset there was no protest at the Benghazi mission that night, as the administration initially said. Republicans have questioned “talking points,” later corrected by the administration, that said the embassy attack grew out of a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Islamic video.

“I never reported a demonstration,” Hicks said. “I reported an attack on the consulate.”

Hicks described a 2 a.m. call from Clinton in the middle of the deadly assault amid confusion about the fate of Stevens and fears about the safety of additional American personnel.

“She asked me what was going on and I briefed her on developments. Most of the conversation was about the search for Ambassador Stevens,” Hicks told the House oversight committee. “It was also about what we were going to do with our personnel in Benghazi and I told her we would need to evacuate and she said that was the right thing to do.”

Haltingly, Hicks recounted “the saddest phone call in my life”_getting word from a Libyan official that Stevens had been killed.
Hicks said that shortly after he was told Stevens was dead, unidentified Libyans called Hicks’ staff from the phone that had been with Stevens that night. These Libyans said Stevens was with them, and U.S. officials should come fetch the ambassador, Hicks said. Hicks said he believed Stevens’ body was at a hospital at that point, but he could not be certain.
“We suspected we were being baited into a trap,” Hicks told the committee, so the U.S. personnel did not follow the callers’ instructions. “We did not want to send our people into an ambush,” Hicks testified.

Victoria Toensing represents an unnamed government official who can help explain the reaction of top government officials to the jihadi attack on the U.S diplomatic site in Benghazi and killed four Americans last Sept. 11.

The official may also be able to explain if officials rewrote intelligence reports and took other actions to minimize media coverage of the administration’s errors and the perceived role of Al Qaeda jihadis.

At least three officials will testify today at a House hearing about the scandal, and are expected to say top officials at the Department of State took actions to minimize political damage to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In the days after the attack, officials claimed the attack had resulted from a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Muslim film. That story was quickly refuted, although the filmmaker was arrested on a probation violation and remains in prison.

Toensing’s client will not be able to testify at public or closed-door hearings because he or she has not been able to prepare classified testimony with the aid of a lawyer, Toensing told The Daily Caller.

Toensing, who previously held top-level security clearances while working as a Deputy Attorney General at the Justice Department’s anti-terrorism unit, has asked government officials to update her past clearances to let her work with her client. But the officials initially refused to provide her with the needed forms, she said.

Officials have now provided a 42-page security clearance form, which Toensing filled out and returned, she told TheDC. But the form is only for a basic security clearance, not a “top secret” clearance, she said.

That’s “not sufficient,” she said.

Toensing said she and her client have talked extensively about unclassified events. But they can’t talk freely about classified event or actions, even in a private conversation.

Toensing said she’s now pushing officials to get the higher clearance, she said, to ensure that her client is prepared to explain fully what happened to legislators during top-secret hearings.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/08/fourth-benghazi-witness-gagged-by-red-tape/#ixzz2Sjd9wGU1

“The intelligence community drafted and redrafted these [public affairs] points… the fact that there are inputs from others doesn’t change the fact that the CIA, the intelligence community, drafted these points,” he told reporters at the daily briefing.

Asked if White House officials made any changes, Carney claimed that “the only edits were stylistic and non-substantive.”

However, two drafts of the talking points were substantially changed by a group of senior administration officials, including Mike Morrell, the CIA’s deputy director, according to an investigation by five House committees.

For example, the first draft said that “we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaida participated in the attack.”

The final draft, however, only said “there are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.”

The emails were published by The Weekly Standard in an article about the House investigation.

For the two weeks after the attack, top administration officials, including Carney, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and President Barack Obama, pushed the claim that the attack was caused by spontaneous anger at a YouTube video that criticized Islam’s founder, Mohammed.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/08/white-house-denies-changing-benghazi-intelligence-reports/

During today’s hearings, Democrats have suggested that cuts to the State Department’s budget may have played a role in the lack of security in Benghazi. This claim was addressed during the previous hearings which took place on Oct. 10, 2012.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher: “Was there any budget consideration and lack of budget which led you not to increase the number of people in the security force there?”
Charlene Lamb: No, sir.

The full video of the exchange was posted by the House Oversight Committee last October and is available .

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/05/08/Live-Updates-Benghazi-Hearing

On Wednesday morning, Politico reported

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/05/08/Ambassador-Stevens-Was-Taken-To-Enemys-Hospital

Gregory Hicks, deputy chief of mission for the United States in Libya, and the top US official in Libya after the September 11, 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks, testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today – and he told Congress that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department lawyers tried to stop him from talking to Congresspeople investigating. “I was instructed not to allow the RSO [Regional Security Officer], the acting deputy chief of mission and myself to be personally interviewed by Congressman [Jason] Chaffetz [of Utah],” said Hicks.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) couldn’t believe what he was hearing: “So the people at State told you, ‘Don’t talk to the guy who is coming to investigate?’” Hicks’ answer: “Yes, sir.” Jordan pressed: “You’ve had several congressional delegations come to various places you’ve been around the world. Has that ever happened, where lawyers get on the phone to you prior to a congressional delegate coming to investigate … Have you ever had anyone tell you, ‘Don’t talk with the people from Congress coming to find out what took place?” Hicks: “Never.”

Jordan then asked Hicks whether a lawyer from State had been sent with Hicks when the Congressional delegation arrived – whether State had forced a minder on Hicks. “Yes, sir, that’s true,” said Hicks. Hicks went on to describe a classified briefing he had with Rep. Chaffetz in Libya: “The lawyer was excluded from the meeting because his clearance was not high enough, and the delegation had insisted that the hearing not be limited.” Hicks stated that the lawyer attempted to get into the briefing anyway, and the annex chief would not allow it.

After that meeting, Hicks was called by Cheryl Mills, counselor for the State Department and staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Mills was deputy White House counsel under the Clinton administration, and she was termed the “shining star of the defense team” for President Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial. Jordan described Mills as “as close as you can get to Secretary Clinton.” Hicks told the story: “A phone call from that … person is generally not considered to be good news …. She demanded a report on the visit … She was upset … She was very upset.”

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/08/Whistleblower-state-dept-censor

1. Two “stand-down” orders were given while the Benghazi attacks were in progress.

2. The “protest” about a YouTube video was a complete fabrication by the Obama administration.

3. Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s lawyer at the State Department, told witnesses not to speak to House investigators.

4. The diplomatic personnel on the ground acted with incredible, unheralded heroism.

5. Democrats came to rebut the eyewitnesses with talking points.

Video of the ignorant Dem Rep Cummings … http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/05/08/Rep-Cummings-To-Hicks-Tearful-Story-Death-is-Part-Of-Life

Breitbart News will provide live updates and analysis of today’s hearings before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on the Benghazi terror attack of September 11, 2012. Todays testimony will feature whistleblowers who are expected to provide information supporting claims that the Obama administration failed to provide adequate security to U.S. diplomates in Libya, declined to intervene once the attacks began, and attempted to cover up what happened by concocting a story about an anti-Islam video.

11:00 a.m. EDT – Breitbart News’ Kerry Picket will be at the hearing and will provide reactions from lawmakers afterward. In her preview this morning of the hearings, she noted the key expectations and witnesses:

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee say there will be “explosive” revelations that will come forth during the Committee’s hearing on Wednesday when three State Department witnesses reveal what they knew the night the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya were attacked by terrorists. Committee members will be hearing the testimonies of State Department employees Greg Hicks, Mark Thompson, and Eric Nordstrom.
The Committee appears to be interested in finding out who ultimately made the decision to tell military assets not to send help to the Americans who were under assault in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. The attack took the lives of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.

11:05 a.m. EDT – Media coverage of the hearings is scant today, with most mainstream media outlets relegating the story to second-tier status. That continues a trend noted yesterday by Breitbart News’ John Nolte and Larry O’Connor, who noted that the New York Times, Politico, and Buzzfeed had buried or ignored the Benghazi story.
11:30 a.m. EDT – As the hearing gets under way, John Nolte has set up Breitbart News’ media live blog at Big Journalism. He will be covering the media’s reactions to the hearings, and we will link to his updates here.
A few early observations from Nolte–not about today’s media, but the administration’s media spin in September
11:39 a.m. EDT: YouTube has provided a live stream of the hearing. It is their first time streaming the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

11:47 a.m. EDT: Darrell Issa (R-CA) finishes opening statements. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) very incensed by accusation anyone held back whistleblowers.
11:50 a.m. EDT: Cummings says witnesses’ statements have been used for media witch hunt against public officials. Claims from today’s hearing must be thoroughly vetted.
11:55 a.m. EDT:
12:00 p.m. EDT: Issa gives what Erik Wemple calls “long-form version” of Gregory Hicks’ résumé. Substantive record of service.
12:02 p.m. EDT: First witness is Mark I. Thompson. Says State Dept. told him it was not “right time” to send team to besieged mission. [via Aces of Spades, this is the sort of response Thompson requested]
12:06 p.m. EDT: Second witness is Hicks. Setting up his background, reputation as man who gets things done–“Ambassador’s bulldog.” “Until Benghazi,” he says, “I loved my job.”
12:10 p.m. EDT: Third witness is Eric Nordstrom. Tears up after mentioning his friends at State Dept. Says “it matters” to get the truth out about attack.
12:15 p.m. EDT: Hicks describing how he found out about attack. Says Chris Stevens did not know about Cairo attack until he (Hicks) texted him.
12:18 AM EDT: Full preparedstatements from each witness:
Thompson
Hicks
Nordstrom
12:23 p.m. EDT: Hicks describes “four phases” of the night. First is attack on consulate, whose details he says many in public have already learned. Says estimates were up to 60 attackers in compound.
12:25 p.m. EDT: Hicks: second phase took place from about 11:30 p.m. – 1:30 a.m., consisted of probing attacks from terrorists. Tripoli response team arrived at ~1:15 a.m..
12:40 p.m. EDT: Some notable points from Hicks’s riveting testimony:

1. We are hearing stories of heroism that have never yet been told to the American public–of the brave response team of six men who drove off 60 terrorists in the first phase of the attack, of the diplomatic staff in Tripoli who scrambled to protect their colleagues and the American mission, of the Libyans who sacrificed their own lives to protect Americans.
2. We have yet to hear one word about a protest or demonstration in Benghazi about the anti-Islam video that President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed for the attack. Ambassador Chris Stevens told Hicks, “We’re under attack!” He never mentioned a protest, and the report of the attack was the first Hicks heard of anything unusual.
3. The administration was totally unprepared to defend the embassy in Tripoli or the consulate in Benghazi. When Hicks asked what kind of help might be available, he was told that the closest available military resources were fighter jets a few hours away. They could not be sent because there were no refueling planes available. An inexcusable lack of preparedness.

12:45 p.m. Ranking Member Cummings tries to push back against Hicks’s testimony, saying he needs to provide “balance” in order to “protect” Hicks’s colleagues. Terrible optics.
12:50 p.m. As predicted, Democrats are pushing back against the idea that there could have been any military response that would have arrived in time. Cummings challenges Hicks on whether fighter jets could have arrived:
As Breitbart News’ Joel Pollak pointed out yesterday, the question is actually irrelevant. First, because there was no way to know at the time how long or how extensive the attacks would be; and second, because we now know more about just how unprepared the administration was to provide any security of any kind in case of emergency.
12:55 p.m. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) asks Hicks whether Amb. Stevens, or the Prime Minister of Libya, mentioned anything about a protest or demonstration outside the Benghazi consulate. “No, sir.”
Asked about UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s assertions about a protest on the Sunday talk shows: “I was stunned,” Hicks says. “My jaw dropped.”

Left-wing political strategist Robert Creamer has published a piece pushing back on renewed interest in Benghazi. Creamer makes a number of claims, several of which can be rebutted. Let’s walk through his argument:

The original Republican narrative about the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was premised on the assumption that President Obama failed to recognize that the attack involved “terrorism.” This charge is still being made today despite the fact that the president himself –several days after the event — referred to the event as “act of terror.”

Creamer’s quote is wrong and his claim is misleading. The President did not refer to Benghazi as an “act of terror” he referred, late in his speech, to “acts of terror.” This came after a discussion of the 11th anniversary of 9/11. But earlier in the speech he said “The United States condemns in the strongest terms this outrageous and shocking attack.” He did not label it terror.
In case the point isn’t clear enough, President Obama taped an interview with 60 Minutes later the same day. Here is the exchange with Steve Kroft:

KROFT: Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word terrorism in connection with the Libya Attack, do you believe that this was a terrorism attack?

OBAMA: Well it’s too early to tell exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans. And we are going to be working with the Libyan government to make sure that we bring these folks to justice, one way or the other.

Creamer continues:

GOP critics persist in this criticism, not withstanding the fact that the issue was at the center of one of the most memorable moments in one of last year’s presidential debates when Mitt Romney made a major gaff by arguing that the president had failed to recognize the attack as “terrorism” and was then corrected by moderator Candy Crowley who pointed out that the president’s account of events was correct.

Crowley’s correction was misleading. As noted above, Obama did not label Benghazi terror in his Rose Garden speech. CBS took issue with Crowley the very next day in an on air report.

He continues:

The GOP critics persist in criticizing UN Ambassador Susan Rice for delivering “talking points” on the Sunday talk shows immediately following the attack that concluded the attacks had resulted from a spontaneous demonstration rather than a planned assault. But those critics continue to ignore that at the time, that was the conclusion of the intelligence community — a conclusion that was later changed based on more complete information.

Rice’s talking points were not delivered “immediately following the attack” they were delivered five days later after multiple revisions to the talking points by the State Dept. and the White House. The claim is not simply that Rice blamed the You Tube video, it’s that other factors which were known to the administration days earlier–such as prior RPG attacks on western targets and the involvement of Islamic militias from the start–were downplayed or left out.

All you need to do is look at the changing contemporary accounts of the Boston Marathon bombings or the Newtown shootings to understand how first reports concerning violent events often change.

It’s true there was some speculation about the bomber’s identities which turned out to be false, but this happened online and in the media. None of the official statements by authorities had to be retracted and the bombers were killed/captured within 24 hours of the release of the first photos. It has been six months and the Obama administration has killed/captured no one. As for Newtown, the confusion over which brother was involved ended within hours.

But more to the point, what benefit would the administration have gained by lying about the circumstances surrounding the events anyway?

According to emails described by the Weekly Standard, the State Dept. was concerned about criticism from Congress.

Now Congressman Issa seems intent on arguing that the administration failed to properly secure the Benghazi compound from attack. Of course there is little question that the compound did not have enough security, since several of its occupants were killed. And there are certainly operational lessons that can be learned from these events.

So far so good, but he’s about to go off the rails again:

But the Republicans conveniently ignore that they had been the authors of cuts in the State Department’s security budget —

It’s true that there were cuts in the security budget, cuts which Democrats voted for as part of an Omnibus bill. But the official State Dept. report on Benghazi did not claim that insufficient resources were directly responsible for the security cuts made in Benghazi, though it did recommend raising the overall budget by 2015.

and that the person ultimately in charge of decisions involving the diplomatic mission to Libya was the ambassador who himself was killed.

Stevens and his staff made requests for additional security. These requests were denied by the State Department.

What possible reason would the Obama administration have to intentionally provide too little security to its own ambassador?

The final State Dept. report said this was a result of “conditioning” of “a few State Department managers to favor restricting the use of resources as a general orientation.” In other words, they held back resources in Benghazi when there was no good reason to do so.

You have to assume that by continuing to pursue the Benghazi “scandal” story, the GOP is trying to imply that President Obama is “soft on terrorism,” when in fact he has done more to destroy the al Qaeda terrorist network than the neo-cons who surrounded George W. Bush could ever have dreamed — including the demise of Osama Bin Laden.

The President deserves credit for killing Bin Laden. On the other hand, he and Secretary of State Clinton also own the ultimate responsibility for the security failure in Benghazi which led to the death of four Americans including our Ambassador.

In a rare statement about the Obama administration, former Vice President Dick Cheney criticized the administration’s handling of the 9/11 terror attack on our consulate in Benghazi, stating it was a “failure of leadership.” He went on to say that the administration should have been prepared on the anniversary of 9/11.

‘I mean, it’s North Africa – Libya, where they’ve already had major problems,’ Cheney said. ‘You know that al-Qaeda is operating there, and you have some of the other al-Qaeda-affiliated groups there like Ansar al-Sharia and others.’

Cheney pointed out that the Bush/Cheney administration “always anticipated they were coming for us, especially in that part of the world” on 9/11. He explained, “You’ve got units in the Defense Department that are superb. They practice for this contingency. And they didn’t have anybody in the area..”

The Vice President was also skeptical about ordering military forces to stand down once the attacks began.

‘I’ve heard senior officials in the Obama administration say, “well, we didn’t know what we’d be sending them into, so we didn’t send ’em.” Hogwash!’ Cheney exclaimed. ‘Those guys train for that. They’re damned good at it.’

It was clear the administration was more concerned about the effect of the terror attack on the upcoming election. ‘And it was shortly before the election, and you know: a big crisis with al-Qaeda attacking embassies? They were hoping that they could avoid that. It was a bit of a reach.’ Cheney described, “they wanted to be able to say, ‘We got bin Laden. Problem solved’ ”

Three whistle-blowers will be appearing before the House Oversight Committee today to answer questions about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. “The hearing should be damned interesting,” Cheney predicted.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee say there will be “explosive” revelations that will come forth during the Committee’s hearing on Wednesday when three State Department witnesses reveal what they knew the night the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya were attacked by terrorists. Committee members will be hearing the testimonies of State Department employees Greg Hicks, Mark Thompson, and Eric Nordstrom.

The Committee appears to be interested in finding out who ultimately made the decision to tell military assets not to send help to the Americans who were under assault in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. The attack took the lives of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC), a member of the Oversight Committee, has said the whistleblower witnesses will discuss whether or not there could have been military assets deployed during the siege that could have saved the lives of former Navy SEALS Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty.

Hicks told the Oversight Committee in April:

If we had got clearance from the Libyan military for an American plane to fly over Libyan airspace. The Libyans that I talked to and the Libyans and other Americans who were involved in the war have told me also that Libyan revolutionaries were very cognizant of the impact that American and NATO airpower had with respect to their victory. They are under no illusions that American and NATO airpower won that war for them. And so, in my personal opinion, a fastmover flying over Benghazi at some point, you know, as soon as possible might very well have prevented some of the bad things that happened that night.

“[T]he administration says we couldn’t have gotten there in time which defies logic, because they had no idea had long the attack was going to last,” Gowdy told Fox News on Tuesday night. “Mr. Thompson is going to shed light on…the siege itself and whether or not our fellow Americans were crying for help and we could have helped them and for whatever reason chose not to,” he said.

Additionally, Gowdy says he will be questioning the witnesses about the administration’s explanation for falsely blaming an online video, made in part by California resident and Coptic Christian Mark Basseley Youssef, for instigating the attack on the consulate. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice went onto five Sunday news shows following the attack and touted the administration’s position that the video was the reason for the attack on the consulate.

“You’re going to know that [Ambassador Susan Rice] was demonstrably false. You’re going to know that she was the only person who held onto that narrative even after everyone else went away from it,” Gowdy said, adding, “And importantly..what you’re going to hear that this cover up, her choosing to rely on those false talking points about the video, impeded and obstructed our ability to get at what happened in Benghazi. The [FBI] was denied access to the crime scene as a direct result of her false narrative that it was a video.”

Hicks will tell the Committee, according to Gowdy, how the State Department attempted to protect high-level officials at the Department after the attack. Excerpts of Hicks’ interview with the Committee show Hicks thought the Department’s Benghazi Accountability Review Board (ARB) report did not palace blame on anyone, telling the Committee:

I thought it was incomplete. I thought that it was–that the recommendations were unbalanced in favor of building higher walls, pouring more concrete, that it was insufficiently strong in recommending that the State Department personnel needed to have more and better training to be deployed to critical threat environments…

I mean, the ARB report itself doesn’t really ascribe blame to any individual at all. The public report anyway….It does let people off the hook. In our system, people who make decisions have been confirmed by the Senate to make decisions. The three people in the State Department who are on administrative leave pending disciplinary action are below Senate confirmation level. Now, the DS assistant secretary resigned, and he is at Senate confirmation level. Yet the paper trail is pretty clear that decisions were being made above his level. Certainly the fact that Under Secretary Kennedy required a daily report of the personnel in country and who personally approved every official American who went to Tripoli or Benghazi, either on assignment or TDY, would suggest some responsibility about security levels within the country lies on his desk…

The witnesses will likely be asked to describe what their transition was like after the attack, particularly focusing in on any threats they may have received from the State Department if they broke their silence about what they knew.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/05/08/Benghazi-Hearing-Aims-to-Uncover-High-Level-Decision-Maker-Names

If the media decides it isn’t interested in the hearing, the Obama administration will not be held accountable for the Benghazi casualties, he said during his monologue on Tuesday’s episode of Fox News Channel’s “The Five.”

“As three key witnesses are about to testify regarding the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, one question remains — who the hell cares?” Gutfeld said. “I mean really, it happened such a long time ago and what difference does it make? Which leads me to another question, what kind of story merits examination?”

“The thing is Benghazi isn’t complex; it’s very simple,” he continued. “People needed help on 9/11. They were denied. Four people died. The government falsely blamed a video. You can’t get any easier than that. That’s Scandal 101. Even Howie Kurtz could follow it, and he is an idiot. Especially compared with other massive scandals — Watergate: people lied, no one died,. Benghazi: the president chilled after people were killed. Wouldn’t that merit hard hitting reporting on par with Watergate?”

But Gutfeld predicted that since Obama is not a Republican, the scandal could ring hollow since the media seem to be invested in the president’s performance.

“Maybe if it were a Republican involved, not if it’s Obama,” Gutfeld said. “Since the media gatekeepers have so much invested in the president, his incompetence reflects their poor choices. They are the parents in the grandstand blaming the ump for their son’s ineptitude. They are the pals covering for their buddy when he’s out with another girl. They are the guy who holds on to your drugs, which is why when Obama’s first impulse was to falsely push a video, no one really cared.”

“So tomorrow, you can ask all the questions you want,” he continued. “But if the media decides it’s not as interesting as Valerie Plame, those questions are irrelevant. Maybe the administration will be held accountable. The media — never. Their only punishment is that they have to live with themselves, which might be punishment enough.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/07/gutfeld-benghazi-hearing-irrelevant-if-media-uninterested-video/#ixzz2SfqPBdtt

As the congressional investigation into the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, continues to heat up, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters on Monday that the administration is allowing survivors of the attack and other Department employees to come forward and tell the truth about what happened.

“We have always encouraged any State Department employee who wants to share their story and tell the truth,” Ventrell said on Monday, according to the Washington Post.

But a letter the State Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Thomas Gibbons sent to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on the same day tells a completely different story. Gibbons was responding to a request from Graham for the administration to allow Congress to interview the five Diplomatic Security agents who survived the attack.

“The Department appreciates your interest in talking to the five State Department Diplomatic Security agents who survived the attack,” Gibbons wrote. “At the same time, we have serious concerns about their welfare and want to be careful not to interfere with the FBI’s investigation of the attack.”

Gibbons wrote that one of the five agents who survived “is currently recovering at a local military hospital” and “the other four have returned to duty.”

“All are security professionals, and we are committed to ensuring their security as they return to the field,” Gibbons continued. “Should their identities become public, they may become targets, putting their lives, as well as those of their families and the people they protect, at increased risk.”

The State Department says it is not suppressing whistleblower accounts of the attack, but it is continuing to keep survivors of the attack from Congress. While those survivors ultimately may not become whistleblowers if they choose not to come forward, Congress cannot even attempt to communicate with them because the State Department is hiding their identities.

Nonetheless, Gibbons argued in the letter that President Barack Obama’s administration has “provided Congress with extraordinary access information related to the attack in Benghazi.”

“We have participated in eight Congressional hearings and more than 20 Congressional briefings, and shared over 25,000 pages of internal records related to the situation in Benghazi, including reporting from the night of the attack,” Gibbons wrote to Graham. “Also, we shared with Congress the classified and unclassified reports of the independent Benghazi Accountability Review Board, which reflect the input of people on the ground in Benghazi and Tripoli.”

In a statement to Breitbart News in response to the administration’s claims that it is not suppressing whistleblowers while continuing to deny Congressional attempts to interview those five survivors, Graham said it is “completely unacceptable.”

“It’s our job to oversee and provide oversight to the executive branch,” Graham said. “I’ve been asking for survivors and people who were involved to come forward. Every agency in the government is stonewalling.”

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), is expected to hear testimony from whistleblowers who have come forward at a hearing on Wednesday.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/05/07/State-Dept-says-it-is-not-suppressing-Benghazi-whistleblowers-but-continues-keeping-survivors-secret-from-Congress

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is now openly talking about impeachment, saying he does not believe Barack Obama will survive the remaining 3½ years of his presidency.

‘When a president lies to the American people and is part of a cover-up, he cannot continue to govern,’ Huckabee said on his radio show Monday.

‘As the facts come out, I think we’re going to see something startling. And before it’s over, I don’t think this president will finish his term unless somehow they can delay it in Congress past the next 3½ years.’

Huckabee isn’t alone in his belief that Obama could be toppled. The pressure is growing just as Congressional hearings on the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks that left four Americans dead are due to start on Wednesday.

Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who will chair those hearings as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said he intends to make the president ‘come clean.’

‘The administration has made a claim that for classified reasons they changed the story,’ Issa told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. ‘We believe right now that may be the biggest lie of all, and we intend on making the president come clean as to, quote, ‘What the classified reasons are that would justify lying to the American people.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added to the onslaught against the administration’s handling of the assault.

‘Political manipulation is rampant here,’ said Graham in an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. ‘The dam’s about to break on Benghazi.’

And former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton told Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg on Monday that he too believes the growing scandal could lead to the ‘unraveling’ of the Obama administration.” Read more.

Flashback: Petraeus: Someone Higher Up Removed Terrorism From White House Talking Points Given To Susan Rice On Benghazi – “Now who would have had the authority to remove Islamic terrorism as the real reason for the attack against the US Consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans? Perhaps someone who decided to arm Al Qaeda-linked Islamic groups and other jihadists with the expectation that they’d use the weapons to continue the “Arab Spring”, the administration who thought that the war on terror was finally over after the death of Bin Laden? It sure looks that way …”Read more.

Slip Up: Obama Admits He Sent Susan Rice On Mission To Tell America That Benghazi Was A Result Of The Anti-Mohammed Film – “President Barack Obama revealed at his press conference this afternoon that he is responsible for sending U.N. ambassador Susan Rice to speak to the American people a few days after the September 11 Benghazi terror attack. ‘As I said before, she made an appearance at the request of the White House in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her,’ Obama said …”Read more.

Flashback: Anti-Al Qaeda Libyans Reveal Obama Administration Helped Al-Qaeda In Benghazi, Ret. US General: ‘Obama Must Be Held Responsible’ – “Walid Shoebat, a former Muslim Brotherhood member now peace activist broke news Saturday night that anti-Al Qaeda Libyans living in exile are in possession of highly classified documents that reveal Obama and his administration’s involvement with Al-Qaeda in Libya, more than what has been previously known. The anti-Al Qaeda Libyans told Shoebat in reference to Obama’s statements that Al-Qaeda had been destroyed that Obama had gift-wrapped Libya, handed it over to Al-Qaeda, and that they can prove it.” Read more.

Spontaneous protest in response to a video or planned attack by Islamic militants? This has become shorthand for the argument over what took place in Benghazi on 9/11. Republicans organizing tomorrow’s hearings should avoid getting trapped in this dilemma and make it clear that, either way, the administration doesn’t look very competent.

Some of the early reports from Libya after the 9/11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi do suggest that elements on the scene that night were aware of an anti-Muslim film. There are only a handful of video clips taken at the Consulate that night. One of those shows a man in a white Izod shirt standing on what appears to be the front steps of the Consulate. It’s not clear this man was part of the main attack; however, this unnamed individual clearly attributes the attack to anger over a film, saying, “The Libyans don’t like to say something bad about their prophet.”

Here is another clip of the same man in the same position outside the Consulate. He says, “Stopping the film is our hope… is our relationship with the Americans.”

Another key early report comes from Al Jazeera producer Suleiman El Dressi. He reported what supposedly took place by phone from Benghazi: “About 11:30pm, a group of people, called themselves as Islamic Law Supporters [Ansar al Sharia], heard the news that there will be American movie insulting the Prophet Mohammed. Once they heard this news, they came out of their military garrison and they went into the streets calling on people to go ahead an attack the American Consulate Benghazi.”

El Dressi’s report spread far and wide the day following the attack. It may be roughly accurate, but it’s not clear who his sources were. Also, his timeline is off. Other witnesses and the official timeline released by the Pentagon say the attack began a little after 9:30pm. Still, El Dressi’s account jibes with later reports, which indicate the militia blocked off streets, brought heavy weapons for an assault, andgathered “around 20 youths from nearby to chant against the film.”

Finally, there is one more source for the claim that the attack was motivated by the video. On Sept. 12th, Deputy Interior Minister Wanis Al-Sharif, who was responsible for security in the area, claimed there had been a peaceful protest at the Consulate. According to Sharif, things turned violent when guards fired shots at the “protesters.” He also claimed the attack might have been the work of pro-Gaddafi forces.

As the New York Times noted in its report featuring Sharif’s account, his claims are at odds with statements from people who were on the scene that night. TheTimes notes, “Two Libyans who were wounded while guarding the consulate said that, contrary to Mr. Sharif’s account, there was no indication within the consulate grounds that a mass protest, including members of armed groups, had been brewing outside.”

The most official source claimed there was a peaceful protest, yet there was good reason to think that account was false and self-serving long before talking points were drafted. Later, on Sep. 17th, Sharif was fired for his failure to protect the Consulate and for prior problems in Benghazi.

In a twist, it seems Sharif refused to leave his post. This McClatchy story includes complaints by Sharif’s replacement that he cannot get into his office because “his predecessor is still there.” A Time story published two months after the firing indicates he is still in the job.

To sum all this up, there is some evidence–in particular the man in the white Izod shirt–that people in Benghazi were aware of the video that night. And yet this is not proof that there was a spontaneous protest. There may have been a semi-spontaneous assault by militants, which is not quite the same thing.

Even if the assault had a degree of spontaneity, that does not excuse the administrations’ actions or suggest they got it right with their altered talking points after the fact. The lack of sufficient security, despite requests from two successive ambassadors, is still their fault. And the decision to repeatedly blame the video while removing clear evidence of prior attacks and militant involvement still smells like a cover-up.

And don’t forget, on October 9, 2012, a State Dept. spokesman said of the claim the attack was in response to a video, “That was not our conclusion.” It’s not as if the Obama administration has stuck to its guns on this. They have flip-flopped all over the place to the point it is difficult to discern at what point, if any, their motives were clear.

Was this attack, then, a spontaneous reaction to a video or a planned attack? Either way, it was a major security failure. In fact, it’s hard to say which horn of the dilemma would make the administration look worse. A planned attack means a failure of intelligence and security. A spontaneous attack suggests security was so lax, little planning was needed to overrun the compound.

Finally, it’s possible the truth is somewhere in the middle. Some people on hand that night were upset about the video. Others may have had different motives and used the video as a pretext. As the initial, unaltered talking points said, “The crowd almost certainly was a mix of individuals from across many sectors of Libyan society. That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qa’ida participated in the attack.”

QUESTION: So are you saying this congressional investigation is not – does not have the aims of trying to keep your people safe and find out what happened so that you can continue to do so? Are you saying that this investigation is merely political?

MR. VENTRELL: It certainly seems so, so far. I mean, this is not sort of a collaborative process where the committee is working directly with us and trying to establish facts that would help as we look to keep our people safe overseas in a very complex environment.

see video … http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/05/06/State-Dept-Upcoming-Benghazi-Hearings-Merely-Political

The Benghazi scandal has truly become Watergate for the media themselves.

Months too late, and only after stunning revelations from whistleblower after whistleblower, members of the Obama-serving media are beginning to ask the questions they should have asked in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans by terrorists on September 11, 2012. At the time, the media members (with a few exceptions) were too busy trying to drag President Obama to re-election. Only now that his second term is safe have they begun to do their jobs. Too little, too late.

That became crystal clear on Monday in a blockbuster exchange between a CNN reporter, State Department acting deputy spokesperson Patrick Ventrell, and a Fox News reporter. Ventrell was asked about the latest reports of Benghazi whistleblowers stating that military assets were told to stand down as Americans were killed in Benghazi; Benghazi survivors were silenced by the administration; and the Obama administration changed public talking points to reflect the notion that Benghazi was not a planned terrorist attack. Ventrell pled ignorance: “In terms of these potential transcripts out there, we haven’t seen the transcripts.”
At that point, a CNN reporter piped up, “Yeah, you have. Oh, yes, you have. Come on, Patrick.” Ventrell again denied that he had copies of the transcripts from the whistleblowers. The CNN reporter repeated, “Well, you’ve seen them – I mean, you’ve seen – you know the gist of what they’re saying and what their arguments are.”

“First of all,” the questioner continued, “Greg Hicks makes charges that he thought that there were assets in Libya that could have been able to be sent from Tripoli to Benghazi that night, and they were rejected. I mean, there are numerous charges that he makes.”

That’s when a Fox News reporter interjected. He was obviously frustrated by the fact that the White House has stonewalled the Benghazi situation for months based on the outright lie that this was a ginned-up exercise in partisanship from crazy right-wing Fox News. And he was just as obviously frustrated that only now, after eight months of complete apathy from the water-carrying leftist media, was the leftist media beginning to take notice. “Let the record reflect,” the Fox News reporter said, “that that was CNN asking that question and not Fox News. Please continue.”

And that is the problem. Now and only now are the media interested in what happened in Benghazi. When it was time for the media to expose the facts about Benghazi – when it would have made an electoral difference to inform the American people about the administration’s failure to protect Americans, its alleged failure to send military assets in response to attacks on Americans, and then its outright lies to cover its own ass to win an election – the media played defense for Barack Obama. They ripped then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney for “politicizing” the Benghazi story. They implied there was nothing to see at all. They mirrored the bitingly disgusting words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her hearing before the Senate in January: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

At that point, it would have made a world of difference. Now, with all the responsible parties gone except for the president himself, it will make virtually no difference. That was a calculation those in the media recognized even at the time. They waited until Barack Obama won re-election. They waited until their favorite 2016 candidate, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was out of office. They waited until then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was gone. They waited until Ambassador Susan Rice had been put aside for Senator John Kerry.

Now they’re covering Benghazi. The bodies are in the ground. The terrorists are in the wind. And the media are ensconced in their cozy retreats, finally ready to write about the death of an American ambassador and the failure of the White House’s Middle East policy.

Perhaps late is better than never. But timing matters when it comes to reporting. The media knew that back in September 2012. That’s why they kept their mouths shut and kept repeating over and over again, mantra-like, the words of the White House: Youtube video. Best available information. Politicization. Fox News. Mitt Romney’s fault. Nothing to see here. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Move along.

The American people moved along. But the coffins didn’t. Neither did the survivors. And if no one pays for the lies of this administration in a scandal that dwarfs Watergate in both its consequences and its implications for American foreign policy, that media will have blown its collective last shred of credibility as an independent Fourth Estate.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/05/06/Media-Plays-Catchup-on-Benghazi-Scandal

If you are looking for proof that left-wing, Obama-shilling outlets like Politico put their partisan agenda above commerce, just take a look below at screen shots of Politico’s front page taken Tuesday morning at 9:10 am ET.

If you look waaaaaay down the page, circled in red is the only story on Libya currently occupying any space on Politico’s front page. Also circled is the fact that this story is the second most popular on the Politico site.

Now, if Politico is all about commerce and clicks, you would think the left-wing outlet would produce or promote a few more Libya stories to satisfy its majority of consumers who are obviously interested in this story.

Furthermore, if Politico were anything close to an objective news outlet, you would think the fact that the three whistleblowers scheduled to testify before Congress Wednesday are expected to contradict the White House’s narrative surrounding the September 11 anniversary attack on our consulate in Libya, would be big news. But Politico is not anything close to an objective news outlet.

During the 2012 election, Politico was a leader in conspiring with the rest of the media to make sure Libya was either ignored, downplayed, or used as a weapon against Mitt Romney. Even though Obama has safely crossed the re-election finish line, the media will continue to aid and abet the White House’s Libya cover-up. The stakes are even higher now. First off, Libya could hurt the media’s 2016 presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. Secondly, media outlets like Politico need to protect their own part in the cover-up when the story originally broke.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/05/07/media-Libya-Cover-up-Politico-Buries

In response to CNN’s Home Page: Limo Fire, Jodi Arias, Amanda Knox:

I see that in the hours since your post, CNN’s “Top News” section also brings us sizzling-hot breaking news about New Jersey governor Chris Christie squashing a spider in front of some kids, and Lindsay Lohan’s thoughts about drugs, rehab, and sex.

Still nothing about Gosnell or Benghazi on the CNN front page, though. Which is weird, because “Benghazi attack” is listed at the top of the page as a “CNN Trend.” According to its home page, CNN Trends is “a computer-generated list of socially buzzworthy topics and articles.” So CNN’s main page does not include a single mention of one of its top-five “socially buzzworthy topics.”

In the past week, the investigation into the September 11, 2012 attacks on the US Consulate in Benghazi has been the dominant news story on most media outlets, including such traditional media venues as CBS News and The Washington Post.

But you wouldn’t know it, if the New York Times was your sole source of news and information.
Take a look at the stories that the “Old Gray Lady” has deemed were not fit to print:

• Charges that the State Department was holding up security clearances for attorneys representing whistle-blowers
• Reports that talking points on the attacks were modified by the administration and State Department, despite their past denials
• Reports that whistle-blowers will claim in congressional testimony that, contrary to past assertions by the Obama Administration, there were military assets that could have responded to the terrorist attacks, but were ordered to stand down.

A good-faith search of the word “Benghazi” on the New York Times website produces no results on any of these stories despite the fact that these stories have virtually dominated the news cycle on new and old media.

Even more embarrassing for the New York Times, “Benghazi” is the fifth most popular search term on their site as of Tuesday morning. It’s not like their readers aren’t interested in the topic.

A source with intimate information about the events that happened on the ground in Benghazi the night the U.S. Consulate and the CIA annex was attacked by terrorists told Breitbart News that, ultimately, only the President of the United States, or someone acting on his authority, could have prevented Special Forces either on the ground or nearby from helping those Americans who were under deadly assault.

According to the source, when the attack on the Consulate occurred, a specific chain of command to gain verbal permission to move special-forces in must have occurred. SOCAFRICA commander Lieutenant Col. Gibson would have contacted a desk officer at the time, asking for that permission.

That desk officer would have called Marine Corps Col. George Bristol, then in command of Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara. From there, Bristol would have made contact with Rear Admiral Brian Losey, then Commander of Special Operations Command Africa. Losey would have contacted four-star General Carter Ham, commander of U.S. AFRICOM at the time.

“Ham answers directly to the President of the United States,” said the source. It wasn’t a low-level bureaucrat making the call, the source adamantly added.

That call may have been made early in the engagement. Both Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey testified in January that they had no further communication with President Barack Obama after an initial briefing in the early hours of the Benghazi crisis, which continued through the night.

But what about then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?

“I have a hard time thinking it was Hillary alone. Hillary may have tried to circumvent the counterterrorism board and deal with this. I think in order for her to tell General Ham, ‘No, you’re not going to get involved,’ she would have had to talk to the president. The president would have had to say, ‘No, take your commands from Hillary.’ He would have had said something, because Ham does not work for the Department of State; he works directly for the president,” the source explained.

The lack of clarity surrounding orders given during the Benghazi attacks is a stark contrast to the clarity projected after the successful Osama bin Laden raid in May 2011, when administration officials were keen to attribute responsibility for the orders to the president.
Witnesses with firsthand information about the Benghazi attacks will appear before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.

State Department employees Mark Thompson, Gregory Hicks, and Eric Nordstrom are expected to be whistleblower witnesses who will reveal information about State’s reaction to the attacks that has not been released previously.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/05/06/Source-Only-President-Could-Have-Made-Stand-Down-Call-During-Benghazi-Attack

The central question in the Benghazi scandal is quite simple: what did President Barack Obama do?

Other issues, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failure to provide adequate security to U.S. diplomats, and the administration’s lie about an anti-Islam video, are important.

Yet the fundamental problem remains the fact that the president did not order a rescue–and did not, apparently, take any interest as the fight went on.

The left apparently believes otherwise–that President Obama was engaged throughout the evening of September 11, 2012 and issued specific orders to Special Operations forces to intervene.

One article that has been making the rounds in left-leaning foreign policy circles is a guest post at Thomas E. Ricks’s “The Best Defense” blog at Foreign Policy, written by Georgetown graduate student and U.S. Marine Corps veteran Billy Birdzell.

Birdzell argues that the Special Operations whistleblower interviewed by Fox News on May 2 was incorrect to suggest that an immediate intervention would have saved lives.

(Birdzell is less polite: he calls the whistleblower a “clown” and suggests he might have hoped to land at the Benghazi Zoo, which “would have provided good cover, as well as entertainment, in case someone saw 40 people parachuting into the middle of the city.”)

Even if Special Operations forces had left ten minutes after President Obama met with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey at the White House, Birdzell argues, it is unlikely that they would have arrived in time to repel the second attack, or that they would have been able to locate and destroy the enemy mortars that ultimately claimed the second two American lives lost.

That may be true. It is also irrelevant, because no one knew at the time how long the attacks would last, or how many of them there would be. And there were still survivors, some of them wounded, to protect and remove from the area as quickly as possible.

Birdzell makes another, more interesting, claim–that the president specifically “gave the launch order at 0239” [8:39 p.m EDT] to send Special Operations into Benghazi.

He cites the Pentagon’s own timeline of events, posted by CNN in November, which reports:

2:39 a.m. to 2:53 a.m. [Benghazi time] — The National Military Command Center gives formal authorization for the deployment of the two special operations force teams from Croatia and the United States.

Note that the Pentagon cites the National Military Command Center (NMCC), not President Obama, as the source of the orders.

The NMCC serves the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs. Typically, if the President were to give an order, it would likely go through the NMCC.

The problem for Birdzell–and Obama–is that we know President Obama gave no such orders–neither to Secretary Panetta nor to General Dempsey. They testified before the Senate in January that they had no communication with the president after 5:30 p.m.

The fact remains that President Obama did nothing after that initial briefing. He did not even call the Pentagon to check on the progress of whatever efforts were under way.

He claims he gave “directives” about “securing our personnel,” but no evidence of those directives has been produced. If he did issue them, it was before 5:30 p.m. on 9/11–or the following day, when the attacks were over and he was off to a Las Vegas fundraiser.

What Birdzell, and the left-wing foreign policy establishment eagerly circulating his post, cannot escape is that the Commander-in-Chief did nothing while U.S. citizens were under attack.

They prefer to focus the debate on minor points of contention–such as whether Special Operations could (in hindsight) have arrived in Benghazi in time, or whether Secretary Clinton really signed a communication that bears her “signature.”

The pushback from the left after tomorrow’s hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will likely follow the pattern of Birdzell’s argument–or Clinton’s outburst:

“What difference does it make?”

It makes a very great difference indeed whether President Obama fulfilled his constitutional duties or not–which is why, beyond the snark and pretense, the left is so desperate to believe that he did.

While many Americans have no idea what’s going on, Factor viewers most like know that the Obama administration at first told the world the attack was a spontaneous anti-American action. Instead, it was a well-planned terrorist attack likely by al Qaeda agents.

So the testimony this week could be devastating to the Obama administration and to Hillary Clinton who ran the State Department at the time. The key question — was there a cover up? Five days before Ambassador Stevens was murdered, President Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan and in 2014 our longest war will be over.

A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat and Osama bin Laden is dead.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’REILLY: Now part of President Obama’s platform last fall was the assertion that on his watch terror agencies were badly damaged. But if organized terrorists did indeed kill Ambassador Stevens that claim would have been dubious. A few weeks after the Benghazi attack, Fox News analyst Charles Krauthammer said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, FOX NEWS ANALYST: Of course, it affects the President because just a week earlier they had been proclaiming the death of bin Laden, of course, and by implication and often by statement at Charlotte over and over again how they had disseminated and removed the threat from al Qaeda. And this is a direct — it was a direct takedown of that claim.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’REILLY: Now, anti-Obama forces are looking forward, looking forward to the House Oversight Committee hearings because they want to put the State Department officials on the record. The anti-Obama folks want to do that.

But what about the regular folks — what about the American people? Do they really care about the story? According to a recent Fox News poll 46 percent of registered voters believe the Obama administration is covering up what happened in Benghazi; 43 percent say they are not covering up anything. So we have a split.

We also have apathy. More and more it seems Americans would rather watch the Jodi Arias murder trial than pay attention to how the country is being run. If you don’t believe me, go down to the mall tomorrow and casually ask some folks about what they think about Benghazi. Two words are likely to emerge? Blank looks.

The Obama administration and that includes Hillary Clinton made a calculation that the American people simply don’t care about the Benghazi story. We will see how things play out this week.

And that’s “The Memo.”

– You can catch Bill O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” weeknights at 8 and oreilly.

Transcript Date:
Mon, 05/06/2013

Transcript Show Name:
O’Reilly Factor

Transcript Talent Byline:

The Benghazi Big Lie

Tomorrow, Congressman Darrell Issa, the president’s bête noire, will hold additional hearings on the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. He claims to have whistleblowers who will testify and add critical context to the events of September 11, 2012.

One of them, Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau, is set to testify that his agency was frozen out of the decision making process from the earliest moments of the crisis.

Thompson says that he was also frozen out of the post- crisis investigation, which caused two State Department officials to resign, purportedly for poor security planning in Libya and elsewhere. Other failings of various government agencies were found in the Accountability review Board’s findings included the fact that the Benghazi Consulate was in a commercial office building that could not be defended and that security staffing was inadequate. The report then goes on as well to blame the Libyan government. It goes on to say:

“Washington – Tripoli – Benghazi communication, cooperation, and coordination on the night of the attacks were effective, despite multiple channels of communication among Washington, Tripoli, Benghazi, and AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart, as well as multiple channels of communication within Washington itself.

Embassy Tripoli served as a lifeline to Benghazi throughout the attacks, marshalling support from Washington, Stuttgart and elsewhere, including quickly organizing the charter plane that sent the seven-person reinforcement team to Benghazi. At the direction of AFRICOM, DoD moved a remotely piloted, unarmed surveillance aircraft to Benghazi, which arrived over the SMC shortly before the DS team departed. A second remotely piloted, unarmed surveillance aircraft relieved the first, and monitored the eventual evacuation of personnel from the Annex to Benghazi airport later on the morning of September 12”

“Hooray for the Bureaucrats”, basically.

Nowhere does the report discuss the response mechanisms, agencies, decision making processes, or the individuals responsible for the disastrous response to the assault. In short, the scope was so limited and the witness list so limited as to make the report appear to be a whitewash.

We do know that on September 11, the President was informed almost as soon as the Consulate was attacked at @ 3:30PM Washington time. He then absented himself at approximately 5:00PM and requested that he be updated.

The battle went on for 5 hours and ended only when the American staff ran low on ammunition and were mortared. By that time they had been begging for reinforcements from any source. Hundreds of jihadis died that night but the odds were insanely against our people.

Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily is the second largest Navy Security Forces facility in the world. There is a marine training group on base. It is only 460 miles from Benghazi. Only yesterday afternoon, the Washington Post reported that a special operations team was stood down in the Libyan capital, Tripoli. That team would have been ferried to Benghazi by the Libyan Air Force.

It is difficult to know what to believe when a wall of lies obscures the truth.

The President and Secretary of State Clinton and our U.N. Ambassador were all over the media the next morning claiming that an obscure video caused the rampage. As Ambassador Susan Rice was busy on the talk shows blaming the video, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the studio recording a apology to the Pakistani people for the video which was broadcast across that nation the next day.

The only problem was that the CIA and State Department security team and the Libyan government and other sources all blamed Islamist jihadis for a well planned and executed attack whose primary purpose was to commemorate 9/11/01.

The Big Lie was continued at Andrews Air Force Base when the bodies of those slain were returned and met by the President and Secretary of State. They had the audacity to lie to the families of the victims about the response and the true nature of the assault.

The Big Lie was continued in the weeks after Benghazi. CIA documents released afterwards reported that all references to terrorism or Al Q’aeda were purposely deleted from all reports as reported in the Weekly Standard last November. More whitewash.

The President stood in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations in October and lied about Benghazi. What is more, everyone in the room knew that he was lying. That same week he went on “The View” and stated the investigation was proceeding. The Daily Beast had the Administration dead to rights as well. All of this in real time.

The FBI was commissioned to investigate the assault. After arriving on the “crime scene” a week later, and after journalists and locals found singed classified documents and had compromised the site the FBI pursued one lead in Egypt and then gave up. The investigation was cosmetic because the Administration did not want a real investigation.

On November 15, the Left Wing of the Democratic Party held a photo op with Ambassador Rice supporting her assertions that the cause of the attack was the video. The New York Times had a remarkably accurate report on the attack on September 12, the day after. As this is the President’s favorite paper maybe he should have read it before giving Ms. Rice her talking points.

The President suppressed Benghazi for political purposes. He does not believe in the concept of Islamist radicalism, it seems. It is not just the fiasco in handling the attack, for that is what it was. We were warned long beforehand. We even removed a heavily armed security detail put in Libya for exactly the chance of a terrorist attack just weeks prior to Benghazi.

It is that the President of the United States used all of the tools of power and conspired with his colleagues to propagate the Big Lie. It is a clear case of perjury. Of conspiracy. Of obstruction of justice.

In 1972 even Republicans were taken aback as the Watergate conspiracy unfolded before the country. A president was forced to resign. The Senate asked “What did he know and when did he know it?”

Now, confronted with the unnecessary deaths of four valorous citizens, a President stands before us having been responsible for the minimization of the threat from Al Q’aeda; for leaving the helm at 5:00pm as the victims were still fighting for their lives; for blaming an obscure video; for creating a mythology about that video; for altering official documents to cover up the reasons for the attack; and for covering up that attack in the face of all of the facts.

What kind of man does this? What kind of Secretary of State did this?

What kind of Administration engages in the most base lies?

And what kind of People accepts this conduct?

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/05/the_benghazi_big_lie.html

>>> Monday, April 8, 2013 –

Two groups of retired military personnel on Monday called on the House to launch a Watergate-style investigation of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.

In separate letters to House members, the groups Special Operations Speaks and Operational Security (OpSec), urged support for the resolution introduced by Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, calling for a special congressional committee of inquiry to look into the deadly attacks.

“The traditional committee [oversight] process has failed stalled out,” OpSec founder Scott W. Taylor, a former Navy SEAL, told The Washington Times.

In a second letter to every member of the House signed by 700 retired military personnel, Special Operations Speaks demanded a “full accounting” of the Benghazi attack, listing lingering questions about the incident and the Obama administration’s responses.

U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, State Department officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen A. Doherty and Tyrone S. Woods were killed when dozens of heavily armed extremists, including members of a local militia linked to al Qaeda, overran and set fire to the temporary diplomatic post and later assaulted a nearby CIA annex with mortars. The attacks took place over an eight-hour period.

Republican lawmakers have pressed what they say are unanswered questions about the events of that night, and several congressional inquiries already have been held.

Hearings by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee revealed last year that State Department officials rejected several requests for more security from diplomats and security personnel in Libya in the months before the attacks. The security environment in Benghazi had been declining, with attacks on the U.S. post and other Western diplomatic facilities.

In addition, a State Department panel of inquiry concluded last year that four midlevel officials exercised poor leadership and mismanaged security in Libya and at the diplomatic facility in Benghazi.

Mr. Taylor called the investigative efforts “disjointed.”

“None of them have produced the answers we need,” he said.

The committee envisaged in Mr. Wolf’s resolution would be established by House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, and consist of 19 members.

The committee’s membership would be the chairmen and ranking members of the six committees with jurisdiction over some part of the issue armed services, foreign affairs, intelligence, homeland security, judiciary and government reform plus five other Republicans and two additional Democrats.

“I really have to salute Congressman Wolf’s leadership on this,” Mr. Taylor said. “He has spearheaded this campaign for a single consolidated effort.”

The resolution garnered about 20 co-sponsors when Mr. Wolf first raised the issue in January. More than 40 other House members have signed on since.

Some observers say the resolution has little chance of passage because the committee chairmen already leading investigations will not take kindly to having to share control or the limelight with others.

Mr. Wolf was unavailable for comment Monday, his office said.

Mr. Boehner’s spokesman, Michael Steel, told The Times that “the speaker has confidence in the committees of jurisdiction” and their existing efforts to get to the bottom of the issue.

Mr. Taylor, who lost a Republican primary in Virginia in 2010, said he does “understand the politics of it,” but that Monday’s letter is “just the first step in a concerted effort to really push for this special investigation.”

The calls Monday likely will refocus attention on questions that critics say remain about whether U.S. forces could have done more to rescue survivors, and whether President Obama and his senior security staff were sufficiently engaged with events in Benghazi.

OpSec is a nonpartisan nonprofit made up of former U.S. intelligence and national security personnel, and can advocate on public policy issues but not for or against any particular candidate in elections. Last year, it raised more than $1 million, which it spent to produce TV and Web advertisements and a short feature film all criticizing leaks from inside the Obama administration about its national security successes.

“We are the voice of those who can’t speak,” said Mr. Taylor, referring to active-duty military and intelligence personnel who were angered by the administration’s response to the Benghazi attack.

Special Operations Speaks is a political action committee that spent more than $1 million during last year’s general election campaign to urge the defeat of Mr. Obama.

The letter is signed, the group says, by more than 700 former military or intelligence personnel, including more than 20 general officers.

They include retired Army Lt. Gen. Dell L. Dailey, a former State Department counterterrorism coordinator; retired Army Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin, a Ranger and controversial former military intelligence chief; and retired Army Maj. Gen. John K. “Jack” Singlaub, who was a founding member of the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA during World War II.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/8/military-retirees-press-benghazi-probe/#ixzz2ScKPfvSF

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee meets Wednesday to listen to a trio of State Department whistleblowers with intimate knowledge of the terrorist assault that claimed the lives of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three of his colleagues. Gregory N. Hicks, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya; Mark I. Thompson, deputy coordinator for operations in the department’s Counterterrorism Bureau; and Eric Nordstrom, a diplomatic security officer, are scheduled to testify.

The heart of President Obama’s foreign policy has been that a softer engagement with the Muslim world has made Americans safe from terror. The whistleblowers are likely to confirm what many suspect — that the Obama approach is delusional.

Until now, the administration has relied on an internal investigation to quell criticism of the woefully inadequate security provided at the American diplomatic post and a failure to send help to its besieged diplomats. The State Department convened an accountability review board led by former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to “look into” the attack. The board’s December report concluded that some State Department officials “demonstrated a lack of proactive leadership and management ability” in dealing with security deficiencies in Benghazi, but did not “find reasonable cause to determine that any individual U.S. government employee breached his or her duty.” White House spokesman Jay Carney put out the administration’s latest line of defense last week, “Benghazi happened a long time ago.” The message is clear: “Nothing to see here; move on.”

That won’t happen, because there’s a lot here to see. The three State Department employees have hired Joe DiGenova, the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, as their lawyer, and Mr. DiGenova has a reputation that he’s not a man given to backing down under pressure. “The Benghazi report by Pickering and Mullen is a cover-up,” he told Fox News.

An interim report by House Republicans last month singled out Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state at the time, as responsible for the weakness that left American diplomats in Benghazi without defense. “Reductions of security levels prior to the attacks in Benghazi were approved at the highest levels of the State Department,” the report concluded, “up to and including Secretary Clinton. This fact contradicts her testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Jan. 23, 2013.”

Mrs. Clinton retorted angrily to questions from the U.S. Senate about Benghazi with a dismissive, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” The hearings this week might demonstrate that it makes a lot of difference. A decision by the administration to reduce security in the face of heightened danger would reflect a failure of leadership that could leave other American diplomats in dangerous places similarly threatened.

Unweaving the truth is about more than settling what happened in Benghazi, important as that is. It’s about getting national priorities straight for the future. Appeasement and “leading from behind” won’t protect Americans and American interests from Islamic radicalism.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/7/the-benghazi-spin/#ixzz2ScGvFZQm

The four whistleblowing witnesses scheduled to testify to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are said to be eager to tell a story far different from the various accounts, all confused and all contradictory, peddled by the Obama administration.

Someone at the White House should have remembered that old Washington chestnut, as true now as ever, that “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” Smarter men than even Barack Obama, wiser women than even Hillary Clinton, have paid dearly for lapses of convenient memory. (The crime was bad, too.)

Mark Thompson, the ex-Marine who is now the deputy co-ordinator for operations in the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau, is expected to testify that Mrs. Clinton tried to cut the bureau out of the loop when Ambassador Chris Stevens was pleading for help from Benghazi. The administration was preoccupied in the midst of a presidential re-election campaign and cries for help at a consulate surrounded by radical Islamic killers was not something the White House thought was fit to hear. The war on terror was over.

Mr. Thompson’s lawyer, the pugnacious Joe diGenova, says his client has been subjected to threats and intimidation from his superiors at the State Department, but they all deny that and insist that everything everybody else says are fibs, stretchers and “full growed lies.” That’s what superiors always say (and once in a while they’re right). Mrs. Clinton convened an internal review board to look into such allegations and several coats of whitewash were duly applied, but the facts are still showing through. “You should have seen what [Mrs. Clinton] tried to do to us that night,” a second official in the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau told his colleagues in October.

Emails and documents from the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Administration, published in the current edition of the Weekly Standard magazine, reveal that officials of those agencies tried to delete all references to the involvement of al Qaeda in the talking points, and identify Victoria Nuland, spokeswoman for the State Department, as complaining that the revisions did not go far enough to satisfy “my building’s leadership.” The leadership of the “building,” and no doubt the people in it, wanted all evidence of al Qaeda involvement, not only in the attack on Americans in Benghazi, but in attacks on other Western target, removed from the “talking points.”

Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the Republican who will chair this week’s hearings, told “Face the Nation” interviewers Sunday that both the CIA and Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya when the ambassador and three colleagues were slain, knew at once that the Americans were under attack, not under protest.

Mr. Hicks watched the Sunday talk shows after the attacks on the consulate in September and was astonished by the claims of Susan Rice, the ambassador to the U.N., in five appearances, contradicting the emphatic assertion of the president of Libya that he had “no doubt” that the attacks were the work of terrorists, not mere community activists. “The net impact of what has transpired is that the spokeswoman of the most powerful country in the world has basically said the president of Libya is either a liar or doesn’t know what he’s talking about. My jaw hit the floor as I watched this,” he told investigators for the House committee. “I’ve never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career, [as I was] on that day.” He is expected to repeat that to the committee this week.

All politicians are interested most in what happens to them. It’s the bipartisan reality of how things work. But the Obama White House, perhaps unique in our times, plays partisan politics 24/7. Bubba, for all his sins, frequently interrupted politics for a roll in the White House hay and gave us a little comic relief. If Hillary isn’t paying attention to the politics of 2016 she isn’t the player we all think she is.

It was easy for her to take the long view when Chris Stevens was pleading for his life, but she may pay yet for forgetting the Bard’s warning in Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2) that “murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.”

• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/7/pruden-payback-time-hen-house-benghazi-hearings-st/#ixzz2ScFMXIyq

“This could be a hinge point for the Obama administration. It’s that serious for them,” Bolton told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.
Bolton made his remarks as Congress prepares on Wednesday to interview at least three witnesses about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya.

One witness, Greg Hicks — the embassy’s No. 2 official — has said everybody knew the bloodbath, which ended in the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, was a terrorist attack.

This despite the White House initially claiming it was an impromptu protest against a blasphemous YouTube video.

Hicks has also said the administration lied in claiming to be in close contact with diplomatic officials in Libya during the attack.

“The three witnesses who have been identified are not bystanders,” said Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“These are not people who are going to report on hearsay of what somebody in Tripoli told somebody that they heard from.

“These are people who were directly involved in different capacities before, during, and after the attack. And what we’ve seen leaked already from interviews the committee staff has done is devastating.”

Bolton said then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “escaped any accountability or responsibility during her hearings on Benghazi right before she stepped down.”

But with new witnesses stepping forward, hinting at a cover-up, the fingers could once again point at her and others, he said.

“You’ve already seen some Democratic members of Congress are beginning to run from this, as they say in the South, like scalded dogs because they can see this unraveling,” Bolton said.

He said it is important for Capitol Hill to get the bottom of who knew what at what point in the Benghazi attack and assign accountability.

“When you can kill an American ambassador and three of his brave colleagues and, for eight months, escape with complete impunity, that sends a huge message,” he said.

“So this is very important to get to the bottom of this. It’s not ancient history, as the White House and Secretary Clinton tried to say.

“We’ve got people at risk right now in the Middle East. We need to know what happened so we can prevent it from happening again.”

see video here –
http://www.newsmax.com/newswidget/bolton-benghazi-obama-administration/2013/05/06/id/503066?promo_code=125C2-1&utm_source=125C2Washington_Times&utm_medium=nmwidget&utm_campaign=widgetphase1

“There are people who want to testify that have been suppressed,” he said, during a Fox News appearance on Sunday. “They’re scared to death of what the State Department is doing with them.”

He also referred specifically to foreign service officer Gregory Hicks, and said “he was being suppressed a little bit, and we need to hear from him,” in a Politico report.

On Monday, Mr. Chaffetz — a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that’s hosting the hearing this week — said on “Fox & Friends” that the media has “dropped the ball” on uncovering the true events that occurred in the attacks on America’s facility in Benghazi that left four dead, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

He also said on Monday’s “Fox & Friends” that the hearings would likely show that the U.S. military could have responded to the attacks in a timely manner, but was told to “stand down,” and that the White House administration worked hard to obscure this fact.

“We were certainly misled at every step of the way,” Mr. Chaffetz said.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/6/jason-chaffetz-benghazi-witnesses-scared-death-sta/#ixzz2ScCEiClY

Mr. Graham, South Carolina Republican, said during an appearance on former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s radio show that more information is going to come to light in the hearings and said the White House has to be “looked at long and hard about manipulating the facts here.”

“I think the dam is about to break and you are going to find a system failure before, during and after,” Mr. Graham said. “You are going to find political manipulation seven weeks before an election. You are going to find people asleep at the switch when it comes to the State Department, including Hillary Clinton.”

The Washington Times reported Monday that Gregory N. Hicks, who became the chief of the U.S. mission when Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed in the attack, told House investigators on Libya that more could have been one to defend Mr. Stevens and the three others who died in the attack.

Mr. Hicks is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday on Capitol Hill.

The appearance comes a few weeks after House Republicans released a report that found the White House and State Department failed to act on intelligence in the run-up to the attack.
“This progress report reveals a fundamental lack of understanding at the highest levels of the State Department as to the dangers presented in Benghazi, Libya, as well as a concerted attempt to insulate the Department of State from blame following the terrorist attacks,” the GOP investigation concluded in its 46-page report.

Mr. Graham vowed on Monday to keep pushing the Obama administration for more information on the Benghazi attacks.

“I hope the American people will want to keep pushing,” Mr. Graham said. “I want to keep pushing because the bond that has been broken between those who serve us in harms way and the government they serve is huge — and to me every bit as damaging as Watergate.”

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2013/may/6/lindsey-graham-dam-about-break-benghazi/#ixzz2Sc7KYCUv

You can bet the farm that right now the media are looking at the results of the bombshell report Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News just dropped and are already coordinating a way to downplay, ignore, or discredit what looks to be a very serious White House scandal that almost certainly involves a cover up.

To its credit, the left-wing Salon is choosing not to downplay what this could all potentially mean for the Obama White House:

There’s been a lot of smoke in the would-be scandal over the Benghazi attacks, but no real fire yet.

But that may change when three “whistle-blowers” give what Republicans expect to be explosive testimony this week before Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee. The controversy over the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in the Libyan city has smoldered, mainly on the right, but the testimony will likely push it back into the mainstream and could be an enormous distraction for an already injured second-term Obama.

Unlike the vast majority of the new information brought forward by the conservative media since the attack, the three whistle-blowers seem credible.

Already, though, Salon is crafting an excuse for the media to ignore the new developments:

In the Fast and Furious scandal, analogous in many ways to Benghazi in the way it played out in the media, there was real wrongdoing, but conservatives grasped at straws to make wider, unsubstantiated allegations that let the actual problems largely escape notice.

If the three new witnesses don’t get the attention they deserve, Fox News and its ilk deserve much of the blame.

On its face that might sound like an intellectually stupid argument, but the media is going to grab hold of whatever reason they can to protect Obama and Hillary.

http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/05/06/Benghazi-Witness-You-Should-Have-Seen-What-Clinton-Tried-to-Do-to-Us-That-Night

Mark I. Thompson will make the allegation that Hillary Clinton “tried to cut the department’s own counter-terrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making” as they responded to the Benghazi attacks.

Thompson is a former Marine and the current deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s counter terrorism bureau. He will appear before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday to testify about the Benghazi attacks.

Fox News is also reporting that ANOTHER official from counteroffensive made the same allegation “about Clinton and Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy to trusted national security colleagues back in October.”

“You should have seen what (Clinton) tried to do to us that night,” the second official in State’s counter-terrorism bureau told colleagues back in October. Those comments would appear to be corroborated by Thompson’s forthcoming testimony.

Joe diGenova, who represents Mr. Thompson has alleged “his client has been subjected to threats and intimidation by as-yet-unnamed superiors at State, in advance of his cooperation with Congress.” Thompson’s account was “suppressed” by the ARB (Accountability Review Board).

The State Department responded these allegations are “100 percent” false.

Transcript:

MR. VENTRELL: I mean, it’s a little bit hard for us to – given that we don’t have a lot of information about how the hearing was scheduled and the various sort of formation of the majority’s decision to have this hearing, it’s a little bit hard to comment on the witnesses. Let me do – let me say one thing here, though, at the very top. We have always encouraged any State Department employee who wants to share their personal story, whether it be to the ARB or the Congress to tell the truth, period, full stop, end of story. That’s long been our position. We’ve made that clear from the start. In terms of these particular individuals, the committee didn’t come to us asking witnesses. We found out through the media and through the announcement the same way you all did. In terms of these potential transcripts out there, we haven’t seen the transcripts. So it’s –
QUESTION: Yeah, you have.
QUESTION: Oh, yes, you have. Come on, Patrick.
MR. VENTRELL: We have seen excerpts of these transcripts, but we do not have them, and they have not been provided to us.
QUESTION: Well, you’ve seen them – I mean, you’ve seen – you know the gist of what they’re saying and what their arguments are. First of all, Greg Hicks makes charges that he thought that there were assets in Libya that could have been able to be sent from Tripoli to Benghazi that night, and they were rejected. I mean, there are numerous charges that he makes.
MR. VENTRELL: There have been —
QUESTION: Let the record reflect that that was CNN was asking that question and not Fox News. Please continue.
MR. VENTRELL: Right. Well, let me just say that this has been made – these statements have been made to the media. They haven’t been made to us. Now, we understand this testimony is going to go forward and we want people to go and tell the truth. But in terms of the full context of these remarks or these sort of accusations, we don’t have the full context so it’s hard for us to respond.
QUESTION: Well, what about – okay. So – but just what do you make of the idea that more could have been done that night, sending assets from Tripoli to Benghazi, and that they weren’t?
MR. VENTRELL: Well, again, it’s hard for me to respond to specific allegations, not having the full context. Let me say this, though. And I said this last week. I can’t remember if you were here, Elise, on Friday. But these issues have been addressed and reviewed in great detail by the Accountability Review Board. There were eight hearings, 30 briefings, 25,000 documents; the ARB interviewed over a hundred witnesses, including people on the ground. And the ARB’s credible, comprehensive process was led by Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Michael Mullen.
QUESTION: I know —
MR. VENTRELL: But let me finish because not everybody does, and it’s worth saying this, that these are two of the most respected, nonpartisan leaders in Washington, each highly praised by both sides of the aisle for their long, distinguished careers. They put out a statement today saying that from the beginning of the ARB process, they had unfettered access to everyone and everything, including all the documentation they needed.

see VIDEO here … http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/05/06/CNN-Reporter-Slams-State-Dept-For-Playing-Dumb-On-Benghazi-Whistleblowers

Video here … http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/05/06/CBS-News-US-Diplomat-Contradicts-White-House-on-Benghazi

Bob Schieffer now carries the mantle of “elder statesman” at CBS News. This is the vaunted position that was held by Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. As electronic media goes, CBS News is the “Old Gray Lady” of the TV networks. When the seasoned veteran at the network makes a proclamation about a political story, it carries weight.

Sunday on Face the Nation, Schieffer used this stature to raise the stakes on the unfolding scandal surrounding the State Department and the Obama White House. Schieffer used the “C-word”: Cover-up. (Video below) “Today, there is new information raising questions about whether there was a cover-up by the State Department to deflect criticism that it had ignored requests for more security for its people in Libya.”

The story has been analyzed, debated and discussed in the new media from the very beginning. Only a handful of traditional media reporters followed up on the Obama Administration’s mishandling of the Benghazi terror attacks and their blatantly political handling of the event so as to falsely bolster President Obama’s image as successfully defeating al Qaeda (remember when they were decimated and on the run?).

It should be amusing to see traditional media outlets finally deciding that the debacle that occurred in the aftermath of the Benghazi terror attacks is a story worthy of front page coverage. Surely they feel confident moving forward after receiving permission from Mr. Schieffer.

Here in the new media, where we’ve been on the story since September 12, we’ll merely roll our eyes and say, “Welcome to the party, Bob.”

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/05/06/CBS-Benghazi-Cover-up

On September 11, 2012, an al-Qaeda affiliated terror group operating in Libya launched a massive, hours-long attack on our consulate in Libya. When it was all over, four Americans were dead, including an American ambassador. For the two weeks that followed, and for purposes of winning re-election, President Obama and his Administration brazenly lied about the attack — and the media just as brazenly let him.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, and for two full weeks at the height of a presidential campaign, we were not only told by the Obama Administration that a YouTube video had instigated everyday protesters to spontaneously launch the attack, but that there was no evidence pointing to anything about a terror attack. The media knew the White House was lying, but still they vigorously protected the president in order to keep his re-election on track. The media went even further than ignoring the cover up; they became co-conspirators by viciously attacking Mitt Romney whenever he brought the issue up.

Seven months later, we now have “whistleblowers” scheduled to come before Congress to potentially spill some fairly damaging facts. But even with Obama safely re-elected, do not expect the media to behave any better.

If anything, the media has even more to protect today than they did last September. Obama might not have to face another re-election, but a scandal could snuff out any chance of his enacting a second-term agenda the media is pretty much in love with. Moreover, some of the damaging testimony looks as though it could land at the feet of former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Because the media sees her as winning the presidency in 2016, there is absolutely no way they are going to allow the deaths of a few Americans get in the way of those grand plans.

Finally, this time the media also has itself to protect. As an institution, and with a few notable exceptions, the media was as big a factor in the Libya cover-up as the White House. This means that if a legitimate scandal is allowed to develop around the September 11 anniversary attack, the media’s already tarnished credibility would take yet-another hit after they spent months reassuring American voters there was nothing to see here.

With so much on the line, including their previous Libya Narrative, that only leaves the media two options when it comes to the upcoming testimony of the Benghazi whistleblowers. One option is to ignore and/or downplay the testimony. But if that is not possible, the only other option will be to personally destroy the whistleblowers in order to undermine their credibility.
We have already seen what the media is willing to do to attack private citizens who simply dare to show support for a Republican. So let us hope that these whistleblowers understand what is coming and are emotionally prepared for it.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/05/06/Media-Will-Either-Destroy-or-Ignore-Benghazi-Whistleblowers

“The talking points were right and then the talking points were wrong,” Issa explained in response to a question about reporting at the Weekly Standard. The CIA and Greg Hicks, who took over as Charge d’Affairs in Libya after the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens, both knew immediately that it was an attack, not a protest.
Hicks, who did not appear on the show but whose reactions were featured based on transcripts of interviews with Issa’s committee, said he was stunned by what UN Ambassador Susan Rice claimed on five different news shows on Sep. 16. When she appeared on Face the Nation, she followed an interview with the President of Libya who claimed he had “no doubt” it was a terror attack. Moments later, Amb. Rice contradicted him and claimed a spontaneous protest was more likely.
Acting Ambassador Hicks watched the Sunday shows and said he found this contradiction shocking. “The net impact of what has transpired is the spokesperson of the most powerful country in the world has basically said that the President of Libya is either a liar or doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he accused. Hicks added, “My jaw hit the floor as I watched this…I’ve never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career as on that day.”
Hicks believes the stunning failure of diplomacy on the Sunday news shows explains why it took the FBI three weeks to gain access to the Benghazi site. The U.S. had effectively humiliated the Libyan President on national TV. That decision, he believed, probably compromised our ability to investigate and track down those responsible.
According to Hicks, no one from the State Department contacted him about what Amb. Rice would be saying in advance. The next morning he called Beth Jones, Acting Assistant Secretary for Near East Affaris, and asked her why Amb. Rice had made the statements she had. Jones responded, “I don’t know.”
A report published Friday by the Weekly Standard suggests that State Dept. spokesperson Victoria Nuland took issue with the initial talking points and, with backing from the White House, removed any evidence of al Qaeda involvement and of prior attacks on western targets in the region. According to emails reviewed by the Weekly Standard, Nuland said her superiors (unnamed) were concerned about criticism from Congress.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/05/05/Acting-Amb-Gregory-Hicks-on-9-16-Benghazi-Talking-Points-My-jaw-hit-the-floor-as-I-watched-this