The Benghazi Cover-Up Continues
By Daniel Greenfield
FrontPageMag.com
A diplomatic mission was slapped down in the
middle of a city controlled by terrorists. The
diplomatic mission was left mostly undefended,
despite multiple requests by everyone in Libya right
up to the deceased ambassador, except by a militia
gang linked to Al Qaeda which wasn’t getting paid.
At a time when the State
Department
was spending fortunes on bad art, on Kindles at
the bargain price of $6,000 a reader, not to mention
renovating the mansion residence of a political
donor/ambassador in Europe who would be the subject
of yet another cover-up after being accused of
pedophilia (but not before causing a public scandal
by blaming anti-Semitism on the Jews) there was no
money for securing a diplomatic mission that was so
far behind enemy lines it might as well have been in
the middle of Iran.
And again it was no one’s fault. Despite multiple
whistleblowers from the State Department coming
forward, most of them left of center types who
wouldn’t spit on a Koch Brother, the panels and
committees wrote the establishment a blank check.
It was no one’s fault. Anyone who disagreed with
the assertion that the murder of four Americans
might be someone’s fault was a right-wing conspiracy
theorist. Anyone who thought that we should listen
to the testimony of Gregory Hicks, the highest
ranking diplomat in Libya after Ambassador Stevens
was killed, or to Ambassador Stevens’ own messages
asking for more security, was a crazed nutjob.
Only a lunatic would think this might be
someone’s fault.
“When I arrived in Tripoli
on July 31, we had over 30 security personnel, from
the State Department and the U.S. military, assigned
to protect the diplomatic mission to Libya. All were
under the ambassador’s authority,”
Hicks wrote. “On Sept. 11, we had only nine
diplomatic security agents under Chris’s authority
to protect our diplomatic personnel in Tripoli and
Benghazi.”
“For some reason, my explanation did not make it
into the Senate report,” he added.
Now “for some reason” the testimony and
statements of the CIA annex security team, the men
on the ground like Mark Geist and Kris Paronto, did
not make their way into the House Intel Committee
report which once again exonerates everyone under
its purview in true Washington fashion.
Was aid denied? Nope. Was there a lack of
security? Maybe, but that’s a job for the State
Department and State already concluded that it was
the fault of three people whom it pretended to fire.
The Senate committee concluded it was Ambassador
Stevens’ fault despite his multiple requests for
security because dead men don’t appear at committee
hearings.
Was there a “stand down order”? Geist and Paronto
say there was. The Housel Intel Committee however
says that there was no stand down order; there were
only “mere tactical disagreements about the speed
with which the team should depart.”
Those “mere tactical
disagreements”
according to Paronto merely resulted in the
death of Ambassador Stevens.
But the report insists there was no stand down
order whatsoever, just “some Annex members wanted to
urgently depart the Annex for the TMF to save their
State Department colleagues.”
Gregory Hicks had stated that a team was
prevented from heading to Benghazi. General Dempsey
explained in his testimony that it was not told to
“stand down”. It was told that it had a new mission
of not going to Benghazi.
“They weren’t told to stand down. A `stand down’
means don’t do anything,” the General explained.
“They were told that the mission they were asked to
perform was not in Benghazi, but was at Tripoli
airport.”
Orwell wept.
And so the idea that there was a “stand down
order” has been conclusively and thoroughly
disproven. Media Matters has splashed the news all
over its front page. American lives might have been
saved, but weren’t, because of “mere tactical
disagreements” between doing something and doing
nothing.
But don’t call it a “stand down order”. That
might imply that a decision was made and that the
giver of the order is responsible. And that someone
above him might be responsible for setting a policy.
The House Intel Committee report, like all the
reports before it, are full of such brilliant
lawyerese, of technical explanations for why black
is white, white is black and why none of it is
anyone’s fault. The latest report insists that the
administration was always aware that Benghazi was a
terrorist attack and that Susan Rice was telling the
truth when she claimed it wasn’t because she was
misled by the CIA.
The administration was always telling the truth
even when it wasn’t. Ambassador Stevens was
responsible for the lack of security that killed him
even while he kept pleading for more security. No
personnel were told to stand down. They were just
told not to go.
It’s all perfectly airtight by the standards of a
political establishment in which one hand covers up
for another, in which holding people in government
responsible is a bad precedent. If blame has to be
distributed, it can be dumped on the vague
infrastructure of the CIA, on expendable diplomatic
personnel and on a dead guy. And none of them will
be held responsible either.
That’s just the magic of government.
We have an $18 trillion national debt which no
one is responsible for. We have a fake unemployment
rate of 6 percent and a real unemployment rate
somewhere between 12 and 18 percent. And no one is
responsible for that either. We have a terrorist
group in Iraq that morphed into its own country and
is executing Americans who could have been saved and
no one is responsible for that.
Not anyone in our government.
We can go through numerous panels and committees
that will humor us by pretending to care about the
latest government scandal we’re outraged by and
after going through the motions, they will announce
that it’s no one’s fault.
It never is.
The Saudi visa express program that helped cause
9/11 was revived last year by Obama. The consular
officer who issued visas to 11 of the hijackers
despite numerous problems with their applications
was not fired or demoted. Instead she still works
for the State Department where she claims that
“shopping” is her “great love” because it lets her
snap up unique Middle Eastern items at “local
prices.”
And the Senate continued to reconfirm her
nomination because nothing is anyone’s fault.
There is simply no such thing as accountability
in government. The incestuously corrupt culture of
government insiders and the smug political reporters
who eat out of their hands make that impossible. No
matter how many whistleblowers come forward, how
many of the men and women on the front lines tell
their story, a group of lawyers with red pens will
huddle over a report and use technicalities and word
games to ignore the whistleblowers and exempt their
government superiors from blame.
Washington can never allow any accountability for
Benghazi because once we look closely at the murder
of four Americans we might just have to start
looking at the thousands of soldiers who died or
were wounded in Afghanistan for many of the same
reasons; including being denied support to avoid
offending Muslims.
The media can never allow any accountability for
Benghazi because the buck stops with their chosen
presidential candidate for 2016.
Benghazi is the tip of a very nasty iceberg. The
Libyan War was illegally fought and backed by lies
that have never been addressed including false
claims of genocide by Obama. That war has now
resulted in ISIS in control of at least one Libyan
city.
Benghazi is a political firewall. If the
political establishment and the media can stop blame
from being assigned here, they can permanently shut
down these bigger questions. And if we can break
their firewall, then the establishment will burn.