A group of 24 Americans living in Israel, including victims of terrorism, filed a lawsuit today against the US government over its funding of Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza.
There is a dispute about how important the video was in provoking the terrorist assault on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the United States ambassador and three other Americans.Considering the accumulation of information clearly indicating the terrorist attack in Benghazi was premeditated, it is disappointing that The New York Times insists on still pushing a narrative that even the Obama has abandoned.
Two days before the election, CBS posted additional portions of a Sept. 12 "60 Minutes" interview where President Obama seems to contradict himself on the Benghazi attack. As the Benghazi investigation gets more attention and focus, CBS is once again adding to the Benghazi timeline.
In the interview, according to the latest portions, Obama would not say whether he thought the attack was terrorism. Yet he would later emphasize at a presidential debate that in the Rose Garden the same day, he had declared the attack an act of terror. [emphasis added]
Al-Qaeda, however, is a relatively weak organization, capable of staging only sporadic terror attacks, with the exception perhaps of remote Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and parts of Pakistan. It cannot take over whole countries. The fact that Egypt, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Turkey, and perhaps soon Syria are governed by Islamists is a far greater strategic threat.
Then why couldn’t the Obama administration have said that the consulate was attacked by evil al-Qaeda for no reason other than its lust to murder Americans, with the perfect symbolism of the attack having been staged on September 11?
There was a dual problem. First, the group involved was one the U.S. government had worked with during the Libyan civil war so it could not admit they were close to al-Qaeda. Second, the official line was that al-Qaeda had been defeated so it could not still be a threat. Therefore, an alternative narrative and a cover-up were needed.How did the mainstream media report this?
Former President Jimmy Carter is winning new criticism over the 1979 Iran hostage crisis for his comments at the end of the blockbuster Ben Affleck movie "Argo" that everyone made it home safely and "we did it peacefully," overlooking the horrific deaths of eight killed in the Desert One fiasco, say critics.
The attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the murder of four Americans there has become a huge issue. There are many stories and rumors that are still being debated and more information is coming out. What I’m going to try to do here is to analyze the enduring themes raised by these tragic events.Among the topics Rubin addresses are:
Fighters involved in the assault [in Benghazi], which was spearheaded by an Islamist brigade formed during last year’s uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, said in interviews during the battle that they were moved to attack the mission by anger over a 14-minute, American-made video that depicted the Prophet Muhammad, Islam’s founder, as a villainous, homosexual and child-molesting buffoon.
Libya Attack Brings Challenges for U.S., New York Times, September 12, 2012
Protesters angry over an amateurish American-made video denouncing Islam attacked the United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Tuesday, killing a State Department officer, while Egyptian demonstrators stormed over the fortified walls of the United States Embassy here.
The United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. An American staff member was killed there, Libyan officials said.
On the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the assaults were a violent reminder that the changes sweeping the region have hardly dispelled the rage against the United States that still smolders in pockets around the Arab world.The next day he (and Steven Lee Meyers) followed up in Libya Attack brings challenges for the U.S.:
At the second presidential debate this week, Barack Obama finally appeared to man-up and acknowledge that, as president and commander in chief, he was responsible for the deaths of four Americans during the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.But was Clinton's own mea culpa any less half-hearted?
After all, said the president, the secretary of state “works for me,” and as the top person in the administration’s chain of command, the buck stopped at him.
It was, at best, a late and half-hearted admission of culpability.
So what I want all of you to know is that we are going to bring those who killed our fellow Americans to justice. I want people around the world to hear me: To all those who would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished.The interesting thing is that this does not get Obama off the hook.
Obama got away with saying that he had characterized the attack on the Benghazi consulate as a terrorist incident because the moderator confirmed his point; in fact he misrepresented the facts when he said
"The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that … this was an act of terror."
"Having first repudiated the embassy's apology to Muslims offended by a movie impugning their prophet, the Obama administration decided to embrace that apology's premise and insist that the movie was the crucial ingredient in the Sept. 11 anniversary attack.
"For days after the attack, as it became clearer that the Benghazi violence was an al-Qaeda operation rather than a protest, White House officials continued to stress the importance of the 'hateful' and 'disgusting' video, and its supposed role as a catalyst for what Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, insisted was a spontaneous attack.
"...Eventually, the White House let the video slip quietly out of its public rhetoric, and refocused on terrorism instead. But everything else that's come out about Benghazi has seemed much more damaging because the administration practiced a strange denial at the outset. The missed warnings, the weakness in security...all of it would have been received differently if the White House hadn't spent a week acting as if it had something big to lose by calling terrorism terrorism."
