Monday, May 20, 2013
Benghazi is about derelictions of duty by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton before and during the massacre of our ambassador and three other American officials, as well as Obama and Clinton’s fraud on the public afterward.
NATIONAL REVIEW
ONLINE, May 18,
2013
Clinton and Obama discussed Benghazi. What did they say?
By Andrew C. McCarthy
‘What would you be focusing on in the
Benghazi investigation?” I spent many years in the investigation biz, so it’s
only natural that I’ve been asked that question a lot lately.
I had the good fortune to be trained in
Rudy Giuliani’s U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. Rudy famously made his mark
by making law enforcement reflect what common sense knew: Enterprises take their
cues from the top. Criminal enterprises are no different: The capos do not carry
out the policy of the button-men — it’s the other way around.
So if I were investigating Benghazi, I’d
be homing in on that 10 p.m. phone call. That’s the one between President Obama
and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — the one that’s gotten close to zero
attention.
Benghazi is not a scandal because of
Ambassador Susan Rice, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, and
“talking points.” The scandal is about Rice and Nuland’s principals, and about
what the talking points were intended to accomplish. Benghazi is about
derelictions of duty by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton before
and during the massacre of our ambassador and three other American officials, as
well as Obama and Clinton’s fraud on the public afterward.
A good deal of media attention has quite
appropriately been lavished on e-mail traffic between mid-level administration
officials in the days leading up to Sunday, September 16. That is the day when
Ms. Rice, a close Obama confidant, made her appalling appearances on the
Sunday-morning political shows. Those performances were transparently designed
to mislead the American people, during the presidential campaign stretch run,
into believing that an anti-Islamic Internet video — rather than a coordinated
terrorist attack orchestrated by al-Qaeda affiliates, coupled with the Obama
administration’s gross failure to secure and defend American personnel in
Benghazi — was responsible for the killings.
Fraud flows from the top down, not the
mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do
not call the shots — they carry out orders. They also were not running for
reelection in 2012 or positioning themselves for a campaign in 2016. The people
doing that were, respectively, President Obama and Secretary of State
Clinton.
Obama and Clinton had been the architects
of American foreign policy. As Election Day 2012 loomed, each of them had a
powerful motive to promote the impressions (a) that al-Qaeda had been decimated;
(b) that the administration’s deft handling of the Arab Spring — by empowering
Islamists — had been a boon for democracy, regional stability, and American
national security; and (c) that our real security problem was “Islamophobia” and
the “violent extremism” it allegedly causes — which was why Obama and Clinton
had worked for years with Islamists, both overseas and at home, to promote
international resolutions that would make it illegal to incite hostility to
Islam, the First Amendment be damned.
All of that being the case, I am puzzled
why so little attention has been paid to the Obama-Clinton phone call at 10 p.m.
on the night of September 11.
Even in the conservative press, it has
become received wisdom that President Obama was AWOL on the night of September
11, after first being informed by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in the late
afternoon, that the State Department facility in Benghazi was under attack. You
hear it again and again: While Americans were under attack, the
commander-in-chief checked out, leaving subordinates to deal with the crisis
while he got his beauty sleep in preparation for a fundraising campaign trip to
Vegas.
That is not true . . . and the truth, as
we’ve come to expect with Obama, is almost surely worse. There is good reason to
believe that while Americans were still fighting for their lives in Benghazi,
while no military efforts were being made to rescue them, and while those
desperately trying to rescue them were being told to stand down, the president
was busy shaping the “blame the video” narrative to which his administration
clung in the aftermath.
We have heard almost nothing about what
Obama was doing that night. Back in February, though, CNS News did manage to pry one grudging disclosure out of White
House mendacity mogul Jay Carney: “At about 10 p.m., the president called
Secretary Clinton to get an update on the situation.”
Obviously, it is not a detail Carney was
anxious to share. Indeed, it contradicted an earlier White House account that claimed the president had not spoken with
Clinton or other top administration officials that night.
The earlier story better fit Obama’s modus
operandi, which is to disappear in times of crisis. His brief legislative career
was about voting “present” because he prefers to be absent when accountability
knocks. The idea is to be the Obama of Evan Thomas lore: “standing above the
country, above — above the world, he’s sort of God.” He reemerges only after the
shooting stops and the smoke clears: gnosis personified, here to diagnose our
failings. He is not a commander-in-chief for the battle but the armchair general
of the post mortem.
In this instance, though, Carney’s hand
was forced by then-secretary Clinton. Testifying before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee in January, she recounted first learning at about 4 p.m. on
September 11 that the State Department facility in Benghazi was under attack.
That was very shortly after the siege started. Over the hours that followed,
Clinton stated, “we were in continuous meetings and conversations, both within
the department, with our team in Tripoli, with the interagency and
internationally.” It was in the course of this “constant ongoing discussion and
sets of meetings” that Clinton then recalled: “I spoke with President Obama
later in the evening to, you know, bring him up to date, to hear his
perspective.”
Yes, the 10 p.m. phone call.
In contrast to President Obama’s
preference for absence, Mrs. Clinton has always projected the image of the
tireless hands-on leader. But the aim of this energetic ubiquity is not all that
different from that of Obama’s disappearing act: If you’re dazzled by how hard
she works, she may not need to account for what it is she’s been working
on.
In the case of Benghazi, however, we now
have context for Clinton’s frenetic activity. Thanks to the whistleblower
testimony at a House hearing by Gregory Hicks, the State Department’s No. 2
official in Libya at the time of the Benghazi siege, we know what Clinton
learned in her “continuous meetings and conversations” that night.
When Clinton began monitoring events after
4 p.m., State’s No. 1 official in Libya, Ambassador Christopher Stevens, had
just urgently called his deputy, Hicks, to alert the State Department that the
Benghazi facility and Stevens himself were “under attack.” Hicks, who was in
Tripoli at the time, made clear that everyone on the ground in Libya knew what
was happening in Benghazi was a terrorist attack — the anti-Islamic video “was a
non-event,” he explained. He also made clear that he was the leader of what
Clinton had called “our team in Tripoli.” As such, he kept the State Department
in Washington up to speed on developments.
We also know that at 8 p.m. Washington
time, Hicks spoke directly with Clinton and some of her top advisers by
telephone. Not only was it apparent that a terrorist attack involving
al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Sharia was underway, but Hicks’s two most profound
fears at the time he briefed Clinton centered on those terrorists: First, there
were reports that Ambassador Stevens might be in the clutches of the terrorists
at a hospital they controlled; second, there were rumblings that a similar
attack on the embassy in Tripoli could be imminent, convincing Hicks that State
Department personnel should evacuate. He naturally conveyed these developments
to his boss, the secretary of state. Clinton, he recalled, agreed that
evacuation was the right course.
At about 9 p.m. Washington time, Hicks
learned from the Libyan prime minister that Stevens was dead. Hicks said he
relayed all significant developments on to Washington as the evening progressed
— although he did not speak directly to Secretary Clinton again after the 8 p.m.
briefing.
That is the context of the 10 p.m. phone
call between the president and the secretary of state.
We do not have a recording of this call,
and neither Clinton nor the White House has described it beyond noting that it
happened. But we do know that, just a few minutes after Obama called Clinton,
the Washington press began reporting that the State Department had issued a
statement by Clinton regarding the Benghazi attack. In it, she
asserted:
Some have sought to justify this vicious
behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The
United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs
of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning
of our nation.
Gee, what do you suppose Obama and Clinton
talked about in that 10 p.m. call?
Interestingly, CNS News asked Carney
whether, in that 10 p.m. phone call, the president and Secretary Clinton
discussed the statement that Clinton was about to issue, and, specifically,
whether they discussed “the issue of inflammatory material posted on the
Internet.”
Carney declined to answer.
We now know from the e-mails and TV clips
that, by Sunday morning, the White House staff, State Department minions, and
Susan Rice were all in agreement that the video fairy tale, peppered with
indignant rebukes of Islamophobia, was the way to go.
How do you suppose they got that
idea?
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at
the National Review
Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom
Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic
Democracy.
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