politics to go: jeff dunetz

Mainstream media lies about Hillary Clinton’s lies

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In one of best moments during last week’s Republican presidential debate, Marco Rubio criticized the mainstream media for reporting that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had totally debunked the “charges” against her about Benghazi despite the fact that she was shown to have lied about the YouTube video supposedly being the cause of the attack.

Since the debate, the media has been pushing back at Rubio, asserting that Hillary’s Benghazi lies were what she actually believed at the time.

Allow me to suggest that if any of those reporters researched the available information they would be compelled to agree that Clinton lied to the American people.

According to sworn congressional testimony by former Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya Greg Hicks, he spoke to Clinton (from Tripoli) around 2 am the evening of the attack and told her the embassy was under assault. At no time did Hicks (or any one else involved) mention a protest or a YouTube video. After Ambassador Rice gave the phony tale about the video on all five Sunday news shows, Hicks called the State Department to inquire why she giving a false account which, according to his testimony, lead to him being reamed out and demoted.

Emails released the week before Clinton testified show that prior to the anti-Muslim video featuring Mohammed, the administration considered blaming a video created by a Pastor Jon in Oregon. 

Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee in 2013, retired General Carter Ham, who served as the second commander of AFRICOM, told Congress that minutes after the attack began he alerted Chairman of the Joint Chief Martin Dempsey and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who were on their way to a previously scheduled meeting with the president.

“My first call was to General Dempsey, General Dempsey’s office, to say, ‘Hey, I am headed down the hall. I need to see him right away’,” Ham told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation on June 26, 2014. “I told him what I knew. We immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary Panetta.”

During the hearing, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) a first-term lawmaker with experience as an Iraq war veteran and Army reserve officer, pressed Ham on whether “the nature of the conversation” he had with Panetta and Dempsey suggested that “this was a terrorist attack.”

Ham told the congressman, “I think, you know, there was some preliminary discussion about, you know, maybe there was a demonstration. But I think at the command, I personally and I think the command very quickly got to the point that this was not a demonstration, this was a terrorist attack.”

The general continued by relating that he told Dempsey and Panetta that it was a terrorist attack.

Further corroboration came in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on July 31, 2103, when Wenstrup raised the question of cause with Marine Corps Col. Ret. George Bristol, commander of AFRICOM’s Joint Special Operations Task Force for the Trans-Sahara region.

Bristol, who was traveling when the attack occurred, testified he received a call from the Joint Operations Center alerting him to “a considerable event unfolding in Libya.” Bristol’s next call was to Lt. Col. S.E. Gibson, an Army commander stationed in Tripoli. Gibson informed Bristol that Stevens was missing, and that “there was a fight going on” at the consulate compound.

Wenstrup asked, “So no one from the military was ever advising, that you are aware of, that this was a demonstration gone out of control, it was always considered an attack.” Bristol, answered, “Yes, sir.”

Defense Secretary Panetta’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013 also corroborated that it was always known as a terrorist attack. Panetta told the committee that it was he who informed the president that “there was an apparent attack going on in Benghazi.”

“Secretary Panetta, do you believe that unequivocally at that time we knew that this was a terrorist attack?” asked Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. “There was no question in my mind that this was a terrorist attack,” Panetta replied.

Two days after the attack (Sept. 14, 2012), the State Department and the CIA were bickering over the talking points for Susan Rice as she was preparing to go onto all the Sunday news shows. Emails show that it was the State Department that objected to the CIA analysis that the attack was caused by Ansar al Sharia terrorists, and the references to an al Qaeda-linked group were removed because of pressure coming from Foggy Bottom.

In June of 2014 Fox News’ Bret Baier interviewed Eric Stahl, a retired major in the Air Force, who piloted the C-17 aircraft used to transport the corpses of the four fallen heroes from the Benghazi attacks along with the attack’s survivors from Tripoli to the safety of an American military base in Germany.

During the interview, Stahl reported the terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi used cell phones, stolen from State Department personnel during the attacks, and American intelligence agencies listened as they called their superiors to report their success. Multiple sources confirmed this.

The conversations on the stolen phones confirmed — even before the attack was over — that the attack was terrorism. By the end of the day on Sept. 11, 2012, everyone knew it was an act of terrorism perpetuated by al Qaeda affiliate Ansar Al Sharia. Stahl said members of a CIA-trained Global Response Staff who raced to the scene of the attacks were “confused” by the administration’s repeated implication of the video as a trigger for the attacks, because “they knew during the attack who was doing the attacking.”

Asked how they knew, Stahl told anchor Bret Baier: “Right after they left the consulate in Benghazi and went to the [CIA] safe house, they were getting reports that cell phones, consulate cell phones, were being used to make calls to the attackers’ higher ups.”

Major Stahl was never interviewed by the Accountability Review Board, the investigative panel convened by then-Secretary of State Clinton. The ARB also never interviewed Clinton or under secretary of state for management, Patrick Kennedy, a key figure in decisions about security at the consulate in the period preceding the attack.    

Clinton emails released by the State Department contains a note from the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, on Sept. 14, 2014, to department officials in Washington telling them not to use the YouTube video talking point because it was not true and would not hold up to scrutiny. 

The email reads in part, “Colleagues, I mentioned to [redacted] this morning, and want to share with all of you, our view at Embassy Tripoli that we must be cautious in our local messaging with regard to the inflammatory film trailer, adapting it to Libyan conditions.

“Our monitoring of the Libyan media and conversations with Libyans suggest that the films [sic] not as explosive of an issue here as it appears to be in other countries in the region. … Relatively few have even mentioned the inflammatory video. So if we post messaging about the video specifically, we may draw unwanted attention to it.”

From the above it is clear that the president was told immediately that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, Hillary Clinton was told immediately that it was a terrorist attack, and the CIA insisted it was a terrorist attack. The White House and State Department rushed to blame a video, and the one they ended up singling out was their second choice. Heck, even the terrorists “said” it was a terrorist attack — on State Department cell phones!

There is no doubt about it, Hillary was caught lying, and now the mainstream media is lying about Hillary’s lies.