The Obama administration must be held accountable

Mike L.

{Originally published at the Times of Israel.}

Much to everyone's amazement, the New York Times toxic opinionator, Maureen Dowd, may be the first outspoken "progressive" in the American press to actually understand that the Obama Administration failed the country when they refused to even try to rescue Ambassador Stevens and his staff in Benghazi.

In a piece entitled, When Myths Collide in the Capital, she writes:

After his Libyan intervention, President Obama knew he was sending diplomats and their protectors into a country that was no longer a country, a land rife with fighters affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Yet in this hottest of hot spots, the State Department’s minimum security requirements were not met, requests for more security were rejected, and contingency plans were not drawn up, despite the portentous date of 9/11 and cascading warnings from the C.I.A...

The Obama administration played fast-and-loose with the lives of its diplomatic corps in Libya and Stevens and his people paid the ultimate price for the administration's negligence.  Of course, Obama and Hillary lose nothing because Democrats and "progressives" are circling the wagons in order to protect this administration from the fair consequences of its heinous behavior.  Days and weeks prior to the murderous attack in Benghazi Ambassador Stevens requested additional security and was turned down in the request.  This is the first thing that the administration must answer for.

In an emotional Senate hearing on Wednesday, Stevens’s second-in-command, Gregory Hicks, who was frantically trying to help from 600 miles away in Tripoli, described how his pleas were denied by military brass, who said they could not scramble planes and who gave a “stand-down” order to four Special Forces officers in Tripoli who were eager to race to Benghazi.

“My reaction was that, O.K., we’re on our own,” Hicks said quietly. He said the commander of that Special Forces team told him, “This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more” chutzpah “than someone in the military.”

This attack did not take half an hour, nor an hour, nor three.  It took place throughout the night over the course of about eight hours and the administration did nothing.  That famous "3 AM call" came and Barack Obama went directly back to sleep; then, upon awakening, he promptly lied to the American public.

In the midst of a re-election campaign, Obama aides wanted to promote the mythology that the president who killed Osama was vanquishing terror. So they deemed it problematic to mention any possible Qaeda involvement in the Benghazi attack.

The Obama administration is deeply untrustworthy when it comes to political Islam and this really is the root of this entire scandal.  Obama claims that Qaeda is the enemy, yet he embraces the Muslim Brotherhood which is Qaeda's parent organization.  Both the Brotherhood and Qaeda share the goal of promoting a misogynistic, homophobic, and deeply anti-Semitic form of government under al-Sharia.   The administration seems to think that there is "moderate" Islamism and "extremist" Islamism and therefore chooses to support "moderate" Islamism.  In this way the administration ends up embracing political Islam, a movement that is as hateful toward Americans as it is towards Jews.

The Department of State, therefore, scrubbed any mention of political Islam or Qaeda from the CIA talking points because the administration was lying to the American people about the alleged defeat of Qaeda and, therefore, they needed to hide the fact that the Benghazi atrocity was a terrorist attack by a Qaeda affiliated group.

Hicks said that Beth Jones, an under secretary of state, bristled when he asked ask her why Susan Rice had stressed the protest over an anti-Muslim video rather than a premeditated attack — a Sunday show marathon that he said made his jaw drop. He believes he was demoted because he spoke up.

Gregory Hicks was the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya at the time of the Benghazi terrorist attacks.  He knew those attacks were not some spontaneous and righteous response in anger to that internet video about the life of Muhammed and was horrified when he learned that the Obama administration was lying to the American public regarding their own negligence.  It was precisely that negligence which led to the deaths of four Americans in the Libyan diplomatic corps.

It's a rather sad and pathetic thing that American journalism would rather back the administration for political partisan reasons than do the necessary muck-raking.  If Maureen Dowd is going to break the impasse then so be it, but it does not speak well of the field of American journalism that it is someone like Dowd who is willing to break ranks for the purpose of speaking the truth.

One can only hope that others will follow her lead, but I would not count on it.  FOX news, of course, is heavily banging the Benghazi drum and a few other outlets have paid some lip-service, but what we need is sufficient pressure in order to bring about an independent investigation into this matter.

If the Obama administration lied to the American people concerning its own negligence, resulting in the murder of American diplomats (which it did), then the American people need to know about it.  For Democrats and "progressives" to deny and deflect and misdirect and demean their political rivals on this question is absolutely disgraceful.

The truth is not dependent upon what one finds politically convenient.  The fact of the matter is that the administration was entirely negligent in protecting its people in Libya, refused to help them when they were in desperate need of help, lied to the American people about the source of the attack, and then even lied about the lying when White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, denied any substantive alterations of the CIA talking points.

The Obama administration must be held accountable.