Before the election:
Obama on Letterman Characterizing the Benghazi Attack
Obama on "The View"
Obama, months after the attack, is still characterizing it as mob action that went violent, still fingering the video, etc. He mentions terrorism, but it virtually sinks into a few terrorists inside a mob. The fog of war is emphasized. He puts terrorism into a context where it is still linked to a spontaneous demonstration about a video that no one could have expected. So he's smart, he covers himself on terrorism but downplays it as much as he can
But given Gregory Hicks testimony, it is very hard to believe that Obama did not know exactly what had happened by the day after the attack, that it was a flat out Ansar al Sharia operation. This, I believe, he judged was too strong to acknowledge during an election campaign. Hillary Clinton must have known all of this as well. Also, they absolutely wanted to put off the lack of response to requests for more security, and the stand-down order only became known last week. Had that come out, it would not have played well in November. Now, it appears, they also pressured people like Hicks, Nordstrom, and others to keep quiet, and even demoted Hicks.
Today, after last week's hearings, Obama gave a press conference: He said that at the time, nobody understood "exactly" what had happened in Benghazi, and apparently he still didn't know "exactly" months later on Letterman. That we didn't know "exactly" what was going on is something I could truthfully say about cooking dinner last night--even though it turned out well. "Exactly" is an impossible standard in application to anything, as Obama well knows. The question is whether State and Obama had any reasonable cause to believe there was a mob involved or that the attack was in response to a video. They did not, and they knew it. Obama is not exactly lying in this press conference. He's just refusing to engage the issues while making it look like he is.
May 13, 2013 Obama Press Conference
No comments:
Post a Comment