New Disclosures on Benghazi

[jj]

So the "GOP quotes" were paraphrases. Perhaps some of the paraphrases were unfair, but I doubt it was intentional.

The obvious malice and distortions in the "paraphrases" do not appear to this reader to be possibly done as mere mistakes.

The fact that after all of the text has been released, the fabricated paraphrases that continue to be bandied about by Issa and company speak completely and irrevocably to the malice of this extensive act of sedition.

 

[The Big Dog]

The House Cretaes Select Committee on Benghazi

Clearly, the evidence that Obama administration had withheld crucial documents has highlighted the need for a thorough investigation. As such, the House is going to establish a Select Committee as House leaders unveiled late Tuesday a resolution authorizing the creation of a select committee to investigate the Benghazi attack on a U.S. consulate in 2012 that resulted in the death of four Americans.

A spokesman for the oversight committee said: "By withholding information, this Administration has only itself to blame for the continued questions about the before, during, and after of the Benghazi attacks. Removing information from documents subpoenaed by Congress, while the same documents with more information are released publicly, underscores the games the State Department continues to play as Congress presses for full and truthful answers about the deaths of four brave Americans."

The seven-page resolution seeks to centralize the investigative authority on the attack with the newly established 12-member panel. It calls on all current committees "having custody of records in any form" on the Benghazi attack to turn them over to the select committee within 14 days of its enactment.

It is my understanding that lightening rod for partisan attacks, Rep. Issa will not be leading the investigation and house leaders have announced that Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., a former federal prosecutor, will serve as chairman. Further lawmakers will be announced after House passage of the resolution, which could come as early as Thursday.

The U.S. Capitol Police are investigating threatening emails against Rep. Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican recently tapped to lead a special panel probing the Benghazi terrorist attacks.

The investigation comes after POLITICO reporters and journalists at other outlets received two emails on Tuesday warning that Gowdy would be harmed because of his role in investigating the 2012 attacks.

Death Threats against Gowdy

I am sure that everyone will join me in condemning the death threats, and hope that it was just a misguided prank.

 

[Mister Earl]

16.5, does the fact that you have convinced nobody with seventy-six pages of this told you anything yet? If not, how many pages do you think you will need to go before you realize that nobody is swayed by any of this? A hundred? Two hundred?

What is the endgame here? I don't believe it's to prove Benghazi is or was a scandal or some sort of secret plot. You'd have to have really good evidence to do that, and there hasn't been any. What convinced you that it was, aside from political convenience?

And finally, what would it take to convince you that Benghazi wasn't some sort of plot to... heck, even I don't know where. What gain would the Democrats have gotten for having "gotten away" with some diabolical Benghazi scheme? Where's the payoff? We see the downside of it, given there's no evidence for a plot and people still pretend there is. What possible upside would there be?

 

[DavidJames]

I condemn the death threats against Gowdy. But I can't help but wonder if they've been sent by honest Republicans tired of their party hijacked by the idiots and morons who refuse to participate in the democratic process in favor of this witch hunt.

 

[jj]

Clearly, the evidence that Obama administration had withheld crucial documents has highlighted the need for a thorough investigation.

This claim is not supported by evidence presented, but rather by allegations of evidence unsupported by material produced.

As such, starting an "investigation" this long after the fact would constitute sedition (trying to impair a lawfully elected official) and abuse of the legislative system for political purposes.

 

[The Big Dog]

The White House Continues to With hold evidence

While many on the left are outraged that the Congress investigates the Administration's Benghazi fiasco, a much more sophisticated assessment is that the White House is responsible for the series of its recent public relations disasters.

As noted in the article linked below, the White House gave the matter new life by disobeying the first rule of crisis management: Get all information out there, quickly.

A State Department email, made public last week in response to a conservative group’s Freedom of Information Act request, made it look as though the White House had something to hide.

The email, which had not been provided to congressional investigators, was from Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes from Sept. 14, 2012, and titled “PREP CALL with Susan.” Rhodes wanted her “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2014/05/08/milbank-white-house-helps-gop-benghazi/8836399/

Lets not kid ourselves, as demonstrated in this thread, the Administration has been committed to preventing the information from reaching the American people, whether by lying, withholding documents, refusing to make witnesses available, and forcing witnesses to sign frivolous non-disclosure agreements.

I think it can hardly be gainsayed though that the biggest lie might have been the statement “This is the most transparent administration in history.”

 

[The Big Dog]

Clearly, the evidence that Obama administration had withheld crucial documents has highlighted the need for a thorough investigation. As such, the House is going to establish a Select Committee as House leaders unveiled late Tuesday a resolution authorizing the creation of a select committee to investigate the Benghazi attack on a U.S. consulate in 2012 that resulted in the death of four Americans.

A spokesman for the oversight committee said: "By withholding information, this Administration has only itself to blame for the continued questions about the before, during, and after of the Benghazi attacks. Removing information from documents subpoenaed by Congress, while the same documents with more information are released publicly, underscores the games the State Department continues to play as Congress presses for full and truthful answers about the deaths of four brave Americans."

The seven-page resolution seeks to centralize the investigative authority on the attack with the newly established 12-member panel. It calls on all current committees "having custody of records in any form" on the Benghazi attack to turn them over to the select committee within 14 days of its enactment.

It is my understanding that lightening rod for partisan attacks, Rep. Issa will not be leading the investigation and house leaders have announced that Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., a former federal prosecutor, will serve as chairman. Further lawmakers will be announced after House passage of the resolution, which could come as early as Thursday.

The U.S. Capitol Police are investigating threatening emails against Rep. Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican recently tapped to lead a special panel probing the Benghazi terrorist attacks.

The investigation comes after POLITICO reporters and journalists at other outlets received two emails on Tuesday warning that Gowdy would be harmed because of his role in investigating the 2012 attacks.

Death Threats against Gowdy

I am sure that everyone will join me in condemning the death threats, and hope that it was just a misguided prank.

as a follow up to yesterday's post, I wanted to share with all of you a well written piece published today in Slate regarding the presumptive head of the Select Committee.

here is an excerpt taken from transcripts of a previous hearing, talking to Sean Smith's mother:

“I can’t offer you closure,” said Gowdy. “What I hope we can offer you is the truth. Facts. Justice. And let you do with that what you need to do as you walk down that road called grief.” He insisted, “From church, to the grocery store, to Costco—frankly, to the golf course—I am asked about Benghazi.”

Smith finally interjected, forgetting to use her microphone: “Get answers, please!” Gowdy said that he would.

The link is here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/trey_gowdy_leads_the_benghazi_select_committee_the_south_carolina_republican.html

I hope that you will find it as interesting as I did.

 

[CORed]

You know, I've read this whole thread, and I've read article or two about the Benghazi attack, but I still have no clue what the scandal is supposed to be. All I see is some vague insinuations of wrongdoing with no concrete details that make any sense to me. I'll have to admit that I don't know a damn thing about it, but neither does anybody that I've heard making accusations as far as I can tell.

It seems to me to be some sort of a rallying cry or slogan, rather than having anything to do with what actually happened.

Well, it does seem pretty clear that in the aftermath of Benghazi, people speaking for the Obama administration incorrectly attributed the death of the ambassador to spontaneous rioting when in fact some terrorists had killed them in a planned, coordinated attack.

Whether this was an error or a lie is less clear, though there seems to be some evidence that it was a lie.

What is less clear is, if it was a lie, what the motivation for the lie was. It seems to me, that if you let diplomatic staff get killed, you screwed up, regardless of how it happened. However, if anything, allowing those people to get killed in disorganized, spontaneous rioting seems, if anything, to be a greater screw-up than allowing them to get killed by a coordinated attack. I can't for the life of me figure out why you would concoct a cover story that makes you look worse than the truth.

The other thing that seems to bother Republicans is that this happened shortly before the 2012 election. There seems to be an underlying, if usually unstated, belief that had the people only known the truth about Benghazi, they would have elected Romney. Yes, it's a stupid belief, but we are, after all, dealing with Republicans.

In any event, Republicans see, have a desperate need to find some kind of scandal to taint the Obama administration, and also Hillary, in case she runs for president. Unfortunately for them, Benghazi is pretty much all they've got.

 

[12AX7]

Benghazi Committee Backfires as Boehner Refuses to Answer Fundraising Email Questions

A sign that the latest House Republican Benghazi show investigation is backfiring grew when John Boehner refused to answer questions about why he won’t stop the Republicans from fundraising off of Benghazi.

Ah yes. Making political hay out of the blood of dead Americans. But only the dead Benghazi Americans. Those other dead Americans on GWB's watch? Too bad.

 

[The Big Dog]

Avid readers of this thread will recall that the first smoking gun was Beth Jones email summarizing her discussion with the Libyan government during which she told them that ansar al sharia was responsible for the attacks.

We now have the email in which jones first records that American assets on the ground in Libya had report that extremists Ansar al sharia had taken credit for the attacks and were in a running street battle with 17 brigade and has asked the government of Libya to assist in the pursuit of ansar al sharia. This is of course fully consistent with the CIA's subsequent report that ansar al sharia was responsible and had surrounded the hospital where the ambassador was taken.

This also explains why the president of Libya was furious that Rice had told the far fetched and preposterous story that the attack was not a terrorist attack.

The administration told the Libyans one thing and the American public another.

I don't know how this gross misconduct can be spun any longer, but this appears to be clear evidence of fraud.

Here is a link to an article where the email can be found:

http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com...he-select-committee-can-get-answer-for-click/

 

[Mister Earl]

Here is a link to an article where the email can be found:

http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com...he-select-committee-can-get-answer-for-click/

Do you have any sources regarding this that aren't from people with a blatant and heavy political bias?

 

[A'isha]

We now have the email in which jones first records that American assets on the ground in Libya had report that extremists Ansar al sharia had taken credit for the attacks

Which was later shown to be incorrect, and that the reports that Ansar al-Shariah had taken credit for the attack at that time were false.

So you're using Jones' initial repetition of erroneous information to claim that the Obama Administration was deliberately lying about what they knew, rather than going with what intelligence analysts told them about a confused situation where the facts were still being sifted from the chaff even as Rice was appearing on TV.

And that doesn't exactly work.

This is of course fully consistent with the CIA's subsequent report that ansar al sharia was responsible and had surrounded the hospital where the ambassador was taken.

This fiction was pointed out to you months ago. Ansar al-Shariah had the hospital "surrounded" like the February 17 Brigade had the US consulate "surrounded" - they were the militia hired to provide security for the hospital just like the February 17 Brigade was hired to provide security for the consulate, and Ansar al-Shariah being positioned near the hospital had nothing to do with the attack.

I don't know how this gross misconduct can be spun any longer, but this appears to be clear evidence of fraud.

Oh, there's spinning and fraud going on in relation to what happened at Benghazi all right, but it's all coming from ridiculous Benghazi Truther sources like your "Fox News Insider" link, not from the Administration.

 

[The Big Dog]

Do you have any sources regarding this that aren't from people with a blatant and heavy political bias?

The link contains an actual link to the email in question.

Which was later shown to be incorrect, and that the reports that Ansar al-Shariah had taken credit for the attack at that time were false.

So you're using Jones' initial repetition of erroneous information to claim that the Obama Administration was deliberately lying about what they knew, rather than going with what intelligence analysts told them about a confused situation where the facts were still being sifted from the chaff even as Rice was appearing on TV.

And that doesn't exactly work.

This fiction was pointed out to you months ago. Ansar al-Shariah had the hospital "surrounded" like the February 17 Brigade had the US consulate "surrounded" - they were the militia hired to provide security for the hospital just like the February 17 Brigade was hired to provide security for the consulate, and Ansar al-Shariah being positioned near the hospital had nothing to do with the attack.

Oh, there's spinning and fraud going on in relation to what happened at Benghazi all right, but it's all coming from ridiculous Benghazi Truther sources like your "Fox News Insider" link, not from the Administration.

again, to attack the link is ridiculous.

1. the claim that it is false that ansar al sharia took credit for the attack is utterly specious.

2. Ansar was identified by the CIA as the perpetrators "was responsible" AND had the hospital surrounded. You do not quibble with the former.

Further it is UTTERLY undisputed that ansar al sharia is a terrorist organization and participated in the initial attack on the annex and the consulate. I have repeatedly posted links to this in this thread, including the state department designating it as a terrorist organization.

Edited by Gaspode: 

Edited for moderated thread.

A pdf of Jones' email was on that site. To hand wave away evidence because it is hosted on a website that you don't like is ridiculous and fallacious.

 

[Mister Earl]

While many on the left are outraged that the Congress investigates the Administration's Benghazi fiasco, a much more sophisticated assessment is that the White House is responsible for the series of its recent public relations disasters.

Sophisticated by what measure? There is no evidence of even a fiasco. What we had here was an attack. The consulate was underfunded, that is not in dispute. I'll note that the republicans are just as guilty here as the democrats are.

As noted in the article linked below, the White House gave the matter new life by disobeying the first rule of crisis management: Get all information out there, quickly.

People demand answers, so they try to give answers. If they withheld answers, political extremists would try to weaponize that, also. It's really a case of damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-do-not.

A State Department email, made public last week in response to a conservative group’s Freedom of Information Act request, made it look as though the White House had something to hide.

No, that's a politically convenient interpretation of that email. Something like that email probably gets printed out in DC every five minutes or so. Heck, the Republican party is notorious for that sort of thing. They call it a "Narrative", and I know you've heard of that one!

The email, which had not been provided to congressional investigators, was from Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes from Sept. 14, 2012, and titled “PREP CALL with Susan.” Rhodes wanted her “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”

Notice it says, "Protests". Plural. Now think back in time to the Benghazi incident timeframe. Do you recall there were other protests in other areas regarding that video, that had nothing to do with a terrorist attack?

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2014/05/08/milbank-white-house-helps-gop-benghazi/8836399/

Lets not kid ourselves, as demonstrated in this thread, the Administration has been committed to preventing the information from reaching the American people, whether by lying, withholding documents, refusing to make witnesses available, and forcing witnesses to sign frivolous non-disclosure agreements.

No, you haven't proven your narrative yet. You're trying to make sense of a Rorschach inkblot test and treating things as facts that you or anyone else haven't proven.

I think it can hardly be gainsayed though that the biggest lie might have been the statement “This is the most transparent administration in history.”

That's up for debate, but even if they were the polar opposite, it still don't make Benghazi a scandal any more than the Beirut bombings under Bush senior. Sometimes a terrorist attack is just a terrorist attack.

 

[Cain]

Barry's always been anti-American. I just hope Republicans can hold strong to their patriotic values and use this manufactured controversy to gin up money and votes.

 

[The Big Dog]

Sophisticated by what measure? There is no evidence of even a fiasco. What we had here was an attack. The consulate was underfunded, that is not in dispute. I'll note that the republicans are just as guilty here as the democrats are.

The consulate was not "underfunded." The consulate was did not have enough security despite numerous requests for additional security were rejected. I have covered this repeatedly:

Oct. 10, 2012 hearing:

QUESTION: It has been suggested that budget cuts were responsible for a lack of security in Benghazi. And I'd like to ask Ms. Lamb, you made this decision personally. Was there any budget consideration and lack of budget which led you not to increase the number of people in the security force there?

DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE CHARLENE LAMB: No, sir.

***

QUESTION: So there's not a budget problem. It's not you all don't have the money to do this?

LAMB: Sir, it's a volatile situation. We will move assets to cover that

People demand answers, so they try to give answers. If they withheld answers, political extremists would try to weaponize that, also. It's really a case of damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-do-not.

This is not a damned if you do, they have no option to withhold documents at all! Their misconduct was outrageous.

 

[A'isha]

The link contains an actual link to the email in question.

Yes, and if you read the whole thing, you see that it's repeating confused, unconfirmed reports, not hard intelligence. Or perhaps you can come up with another explanation for why the planned attack on Embassy Tripoli by the "Tripoli Council" never happened that night.

again, to attack the link is ridiculous.

I'm not attacking the link, I'm attacking your assertions about what was known about the role of Ansar al-Shariah at the time the talking points were drafted.

1. the claim that it is false that ansar al sharia took credit for the attack is utterly specious.

Nope, it's been known since a month and a half after the attacks took place:

The e-mail carried the subject line: "Update 2: Ansar al Sharia Claims Responsibility For Benghazi Attack." The message said: "Embassy Tripoli reports the group has claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli."

That message was sent to a wide range of federal offices, including the FBI, from the State Department at 6:07 p.m. ET on September 11 - seven minutes into September 12 in Libya. At that time, the attack on the consulate was ongoing, and the subsequent assault on the annex building, in which two more Americans would be killed, had not begun.

[...]

However, an examination of the known Facebook and Twitter accounts of Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi reveals no such claim of responsibility. Aaron Zelin, a research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, tracks dozens of jihadist websites and archives much of what they say. He told CNN he was unaware of any such claim having been posted on the official Facebook page or Twitter feed of Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi.

Zelin, who said his RSS feed sends him any new statement from the group, provided CNN with a copy of that feed. It shows no Facebook update between September 8 and September 12, when a posting late that afternoon first referenced the attack. Zelin notes that the posting referred to a news conference the group had held earlier that day in Benghazi in which it denied any role in the assault on the consulate, while sympathizing with the attackers.

Accompanying a posting of the news conference on YouTube, a commentary says that the attack on the consulate was "a wave of rage for Allah and his Prophet, it came from the Muslim youths."

The posting continues: "Ansar al-Sharia brigade did not officially participate as a military body, nor received any orders directed from the brigade."

The group's Twitter feed tells the same story. The account, @anssarelshariea, bears the group's logo and a tweet on September 8 - and then nothing until four days later. And at no point is there a claim of involvement in or responsibility for the attack on the U.S. Consulate compound.

This email was sent at virtually the same time as Jones' email at the link above, and references the exact same incorrect information (including the report of an attack on Embassy Tripoli).

2. Ansar was identified by the CIA as the perpetrators "was responsible"

The first draft of the talking points memo produced by the CIA on September 14th, before anyone else had touched it, read:

Initial press reporting linked the attack to Ansar al-Sharia. The group has since released a statement that its leadership did not order the attacks, but did not deny some of its members were involved.

Which is an accurate description of exactly what happened: the Beth Jones, drawing on those early, confused press reports, emailed to everyone that Ansar al-Shariah had claimed responsibility, but they hadn't claimed responsibility and in fact denied any responsibility. It was known that Ansar al-Shariah members were there, but what their specific role as an organization was still being sorted out at the time the talking points were being drafted and Rice went on TV.

Which is what makes all this "smoking gun email" ******** just that: ********.

A pdf of Jones' email was on that site. To hand wave away evidence because it is hosted on a website that you don't like is ridiculous and fallacious.

And despite the assertions of that idiotic website, Jones' email is not actually "evidence" for anything, and particularly not for what the Benghazi Truthers claim.

 

[The Big Dog]

The actual social media posts establishing ansar al sharia's involvement have been discussed at lenghth:

We have discussed at long length the fact that Embassy Tripoli, the State Department and the press initially identified Ansar Al Sharia as among the attackers due to chatter on Social Media Websites.

I have finally tracked down one such example. The following link is a translation from a web site of an affiliate of Ansar al Sharia maintained by Libyan Ansar Minbar. From what I understand, the web page is a forum for supporters of the Sharia.

"Jealous of his religion
09-11-2012, 09:11 PM
Newsflash


Gunmen from the group Ansar al-Sharia attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi."

here is the translation:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ar&u=http://www.libya-s.net/vb/archive/index.php/t-384.html&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://www.libya-s.net/vb/archive/index.php/t-384.html%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3Dmew%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-USfficial%26channel%3Dnp

Nope, it's been known since a month and a half after the attacks took place:

....

And despite the assertions of that idiotic website, Jones' email is not actually "evidence" for anything, and particularly not for what the Benghazi Truthers claim.

Further, the FBI has confirmed through social media of Ali Ani al Harzi ties to the Benghazi attack were first discovered after US officials learned that he had "posted an update on social media about the fighting shortly after it had begun." This was "[o]ne of the first clues the intelligence community had about the perpetrators" in Benghazi.

Ansar al sharia's role is not even debatable at this point.

 

[Mister Earl]

The consulate was not "underfunded." The consulate was did not have enough security despite numerous requests for additional security were rejected. I have covered this repeatedly:

That's nice. So the Republicans who also refused to provide more security for the consulate were complicit in this conspiracy? If not, why does the conspiracy only pertain to Democrats and not Republicans?

For that matter, why weren't politicians put in jail after the Beirut bombing? Where was the political hay there? Why wasn't there any when there was ANOTHER attack 18 months later, and the president sheepishly admitted that the measures they were going to do to enhance security just hadn't been implemented?

I'll answer my own question for you: Unlike Benghazi, politicians at the time weren't trying to score pathetic, cheap political points off of dead Americans. And I'll say again that I find it profoundly telling that this president is doing so well that the extremists on the right have only two attack vectors: Obamacare and Benghazi. One fight they've profoundly lost and the other is profoundly fabricated.

I know you'll disagree with me. But that's fine. Reality and I simply don't care.

 

[The Big Dog]

That's nice. So the Republicans who also refused to provide more security for the consulate were complicit in this conspiracy?

For that matter, why weren't politicians put in jail after the Beirut bombing? ....

Reality and I simply don't care.

Mister Earl, the evidence is uncontradicted that funding had nothing at all to do with security at the Benghazi facility. End of story..

"Put politicians in jail?" I am unaware of anyone that has ever suggested this in connection with Benghazi, and this is clearly a complete straw man about a completely unrelated attack.

That is reality, whether you care about it or not.