Benghazi Just Won't Go Away

Mike L.

Peter Wehner has a piece in Commentary discussing a bit of muck-raking by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard.  Referring to Hayes' piece, Wehner writes:

It provides fresh evidence that, in the words of Hayes, “senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what had happened in the days following the assaults [on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi on September 11, 2012].” (Emphasis added).

We now know, for example, that the early talking points were accurate–and it was only after the State Department and the White House, among others, got done revising the talking points that the truth was transformed into a false account.

To be specific: early (accurate) references to “Islamic extremists” were removed. Early (accurate) references to “attacks” were changed to “demonstrations.” And there was no mention of any YouTube video in any of the many drafts of the talking points–even though everyone from the president of the United States to the secretary of state to the U.N. ambassador blamed the video for the attacks.

The Benghazi scandal has always been multi-layered. There was the near-criminal negligence before and during the assault on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, when pleas for more security prior to the attacks and assistance during the attacks were denied. And then there were the misleading accounts after the attacks.

It now seems clear, based on the reporting by Steve Hayes and the accounts of those who were key actors during the attacks, that the accounts of the attacks by the Obama administration were not simply wrong; they were knowingly and willfully wrong. Which turns a mistake into a lie.

I have not written much about the Benghazi scandal because I honestly didn't feel that I knew enough about what happened to say too much.  I knew that when the Obama administration blamed the riots in Egypt and the murders in Libya on some stupid internet video about the life of Muhammed that they were blowing smoke, or at least I certainly suspected so.  At the time I thought that the administration was taking the American public for fools, but why shouldn't they if it works?  Politics is not tiddly-winks and politicians will generally do whatever they need to do in order to survive and advance their agendas and this, quite obviously, often involves misleading the American public.

What I couldn't know, however, was whether or not the Obama administration deliberately failed to defend the four Americans in Benghazi.

The Stephen Hayes piece needs to be closely examined and if he is right then this is an impeachable offense.  Richard Nixon was forced out of office, but no one died in the Watergate scandal.  Bill Clinton actually was impeached merely for lying (perjury) about an extramarital affair.  If it is true that Obama refused pleas for help during the attack, then the man is not fit for the office of President of the United States, much less Commander and Chief of the US Armed Forces.

I am not leaping to conclusions, but this needs to be examined more closely and the American public needs to be alerted to the fact that this is not over.