This story could not have been written 14 months ago. Parts of it perhaps could have been exposed if people were paying more attention at the time. I’ll confess, I was not.
However, as I write in November, 2013 we know a good deal more about the September 11th attack on Benghazi than we did when it broke. Part of that information gap was intentional. I’ll show you there was a deliberate cover-up campaign by the Obama administration. I’ll show you that part of it was a deliberate campaign of omission and misinformation by media, especially CNN. Part of it is just the normal process of more information coming out over time.
The main motive of the cover-up by the Obama administration and the media was straightforward: to ensure a second Obama term.
When the temporary mission in Benghazi was attacked and four Americans killed, the 2012 presidential election was less then 60 days away.
Today, it’s acknowledged that the attack was planned in advance and carried out by Ansar Al Sharia, an Al Qaeda affiliate.
For example, a year after the attack the Washington Post ran an article titled U.S. officials identify extremist groups in Benghazi attack.
The article’s lead paragraph says:
U.S. counterterrorism officials have determined that several extremist groups, including Ansar al-Sharia, took part in last year’s attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other officials. They think the terrorist organizations selected the U.S. diplomatic outpost there as a potential target ahead of time.
The first official acknowledgement of that Benghazi was a planned attack by Al Qaeda appears to have come from Former CIA Director David Petraeus.
This admission came on Capitol Hill testimony on November 12, 2012–six days after the election victory of President Obama.
CNN reported that night Ex-CIA chief Petraeus testifies Benghazi attack was al Qaeda-linked terrorism.
The hearing was closed but New York Congressman Pete King spoke to reporters afterwards and said this conflicted with previous accounts.
King said Petraeus’ testimony differed from an earlier assessment the former CIA director gave lawmakers just days after the September 11 attack, which left four Americans dead, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.
“He (Petraeus) … stated that he thought all along he made it clear that there was significant terrorist involvement, and that is not my recollection of what he told us on September 14,” King said.
“The clear impression we were given (in September) was that the overwhelming amount of evidence was that it arose out of a spontaneous demonstration, and was not a terrorist attack,” he said.
Rep. King’s belief that the information supplied by the Obama administration has changed was correct.
That’s because the administration knew within hours that the Benghazi attack had been carried out with military precision by Al Qaeda. Not only did the Obama administration know but CNN had actually reported this information live on the night of the attack, pointing out the same details that Petraeus told Congress after the election was over.
Before I go over the shocking and indisputable timeline of events that proves the Obama administration and CNN covered-up the truth about Benghazi, it’s important to understand a little about the events of the night and how we know what we know.
In the days following the attack, the Obama Administration and CNN tried to paint the events in Benghazi that night as muddled and confusing. In official White House statements and news stories, they convinced the American public that nobody could really know what happened. They told the nation that uncovering the truth about Benghazi would be a long process.
Ambassador Susan Rice made five now-infamous appearances on Sunday morning talk shows five days after the attack on September 16, 2012. She repeated the same thing that she told Jake Tapper on ABC’s “This Week”:
Well, Jake, first of all, it’s important to know that there’s an FBI investigation that has begun and will take some time to be completed.
Ambassador Rice didn’t mention in the any of the five appearances what the Obama administration knew within hours: that the attacks were well organized and had been carried out by Ansar Al Sharia. With the election so close, they needed to run out the clock by muddling the facts.
Part of this cover-up involved not telling the public that they were actually many eyewitnesses at the Embassy that night.
Those eyewitnesses to the attack provided immediate testimony that was clear and consistent; Ansar Al Sharia blocked the roads around the mission and attacked with RPGs and rifles. No witness reported a demonstration like the one in Cairo earlier that day, because there was no such demonstration in Libya. In Benghazi, there was an attack.
Who were these witnesses?
First and foremost, there were the people stationed at the embassy that night. This included U.S. personnel as well as Libyan guards who worked for Blue Mountain Security or were part of the Quick Response force.
These guards and personnel not only knew what happened that night but they also were well aware of the growing public presence of Al Qaeda in Benghazi leading up to the attack.
The problem with many of these eyewitnesses is that they either can’t talk on the record or they are Arabic speaking Libyans who are hard for U.S. journalists to access.
The good news: there is one witness who has gone on the record who was part of mission operations, speaks English and Arabic and was willing to go on the record with a detailed account that included the fact that the attack was carried out by Al Sharia.
The bad news: that witness is Dylan Davies, who was the subject of controversy recently for his appearance on 60 Minutes.
So, let’s leave Mr. Davies aside for the moment.
There were other witnesses who saw the attack; bystanders who weren’t connected with the operation of the mission.
One of these witnesses was a man named Sofian Kadura, whose account of the attack was published the next day by France 24. I’ve found Mr. Kadura’s Facebook page and he’s currently living in Ontario, Canada.
The article with the statements of Sofian Kadura written by journalists Gaelle Faure and Segolène Malterre provides a great deal of insight on what actually happened that night in Benghazi.
For once thing, it confirms all the other reports about what we now know to be true: that the attack was by Ansar al Sharia, that roads were blocks and it was well organized.
Kadura, who is Muslim, said he was out with friends when they saw shooting at the mission:
…when we tried to get closer to the consulate, we realized that armed Islamist extremists had blocked off the streets. They had automatic rifles, RPGs, and big machine guns mounted on cars. It was obvious they were Islamists due to their long beards.
Mr. Kadura also reveals something that may shock many of people, especially conservatives, who have been critical of the Obama administration over the Benghazi issue; the YouTube trailer of the film The Innocence of Muslims may have been a co-factor in the attack by Ansar Al Sharia.
The issue of the Innocence of Muslims video is a complex one that I’ll discuss later.
While the motives of Ansar Al Sharia aren’t 100% clear, even today, what is clear is that 1) Ansar Al Sharia led the organized attack on the Benghazi mission 2) the Obama administration and CNN knew this on 9/11/12 and covered it up and 3) the cover-up involved ‘blaming the video’ by trying to conflate the attack in Libya with a large protest earlier that day in Cairo, Egypt.
There were eyewitnesses to what happened in Benghazi. As you’ll see in the next chapter, the Obama administration and CNN knew about them. The eyewitness stories are consistent with what General Petraeus finally admitted to Congress six days after the election.
The American people still haven’t heard from them all the eyewitness, in part because it would reveal what the Obama administration and CNN knew and when they knew it.
Before looking at the timeline, it’s also important to remember what President Obama’s claims had been about Al Qaeda during the 2012 elections. This issue is crucial because it shows why the cover-up was so important to the Obama administration and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Even as late as the third Presidential Debate on October 22nd, President Obama was claiming that Al Qaeda’s core leadership had been “decimated.”
In an article called CNN Fact Check: Is al Qaeda’s core decimated or is group growing?, the news network laid out Obama and Romney’s positions this way:
The claims:
Obama: Al Qaeda’s core leadership has been decimated.
Romney: This is a group that is now involved in 10 or 12 countries, and it presents an enormous threat to our friends, to the world, to America, long term, and we must have a comprehensive strategy to help reject this kind of extremism.
What did CNN conclude? CNN said:
Both claims are true.
Al Qaeda’s core leadership has been seriously weakened, but the affiliates remain active, particularly in Yemen and North Africa, where the threat to Western interests and plotting against the homeland remain strong.
Romney’s claim that al Qaeda is in 10 to 12 countries is in the ballpark, and the administration would seem to agree that poses an enormous threat.
You’ll note that CNN makes no mention of the attack on Benghazi in their Fact Check.
Now, imagine for a moment how this debate and the entire election would have been altered if CNN and the Obama administration told the truth as they knew it on the night of September 11th, 2012.
President Obama’s repeated claims that Al Qaeda had been decimated were proven false by the Benghazi attack, which the Obama administration and CNN both knew was carried out by Al Qaeda affiliate Ansar Al Sharia.
Not only would revealing the truth about Benghazi have been a body blow to the Obama campaign, it also would have likely snuffed out Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions.
In fact, it’s the 2016 election dreams of Hillary Clinton that are still at stake with the Benghazi issue.
As I’m about to demonstrate, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton along with world famous news network CNN were personally, actively involved in hiding the truth from the American public about what really happened on that dark night in Benghazi. They did this by hiding information, failing to reveal what they knew to be true until after the election and outright lying.
Even more damning, the Obama administration intimidated the media, eyewitnesses and government officials as part of their cover-up. The Obama / Clinton political machine used the bully pulpit, the White House briefing room and outside groups like Media Matters for America to not just bury the story but to smear and insult anyone trying to find the truth. They turned the death of four Americans into a partisan political issue and called it a phony scandal, a hoax and right-wing conspiracy theory.
In order to keep and preserve political power, Obama and Clinton ran roughshod over the facts as they knew them on the night of attack, used a scorched earth strategy against truth-tellers and with the direct help of CNN managed to win the 2012 election.
And the whole time, they knew the truth. They knew the truth. They knew.
The truth about Benghazi is that the cover-up is the biggest crime of all.
That’s my contention. Now, let me prove it to you.