Benghazi lies exposed
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Author(s):
Boston Herald editorial staff
Surely there has never been a bigger bunch of liars than the crew currently occupying the White House and the now-departed secretary of state.
The steady drip, drip, drip of the Benghazi scandal is now a torrent — one that cries out for a special congressional Select Committee to put it all together email by email, revelation by revelation and lie by lie.
Yesterday ABC News reported on 12 versions of those now infamous talking points — the ones that we now know began with the real story and ended in the highly sanitized pre-election version dished out to the public on five Sunday morning talk shows by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.
For eight months the lies have continued.
On Nov. 28, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, “Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened. The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”
That was an outright lie.
What was excised from those original talking points drafted by the intelligence community were all references to al-Qaeda and its affiliate in the region Ansar al-Sharia — which Libya’s top officials pinpointed as the source of the attack the very night the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed.
The CIA version of the talking points mentioned both al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Sharia and a host of earlier warnings about their level of activity in Libya that created a dangerous situation for U.S. personnel.
All of those references disappeared after an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, from State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland who said such information “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?”
Why indeed. Just because it happens to be the truth — even if the truth reflects badly on her boss, Hillary Clinton.
There surely must be a special place in hell reserved for those who cried crocodile tears at the death of our ambassador after doing nothing to help keep him safe and everything to cover up the true nature of the attack.