Yes America, We Were Lied to About Benghazi

Shockingly, CBS News has finally stepped up and told the truth about, as much as they could find, what happened in Benghazi.

60 Minutes: Yes, America, We were lied to about Benghazi
by John Hayward on Townhall.com

“60 Minutes” ran a report on the Benghazi scandal Sunday night that confirmed its status as an enduring scandal with many questions still remaining to be answered. Good thing the media was willing to cover for Barack Obama until he got re-elected, because this is some really damning stuff. The video is about 15 minutes long, and well worth watching in full:

For mainstream media news consumers, a lot of this will come as a total shock. (CBS News, it should be noted, has been far more aggressive in pursuing the Benghazi story than its competitors; they say Sunday night’s report was a year in the making.) Yes, America, you were lied to, early and often, by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their crew. They knew damn well it was a terrorist attack from the beginning. They knew it was never a protest over a provocative YouTube video. They looked right into the faces of the families who lost sons, brothers, and husbands in Benghazi and lied to them.

The important point to take away from this exhaustive report is that the Administration knew it was a terrorist attack before it happened. Security officials in Libya knew al-Qaeda was going to launch an attack… because they said so. They boasted online of plans to attack the Red Cross, the British, and the Americans. ”They made good on two out of the three promises,” said Lt. Colonel Andy Wood, who was based in Tripoli and met routinely with Ambassador Christopher Stevens, and was at his post when terrorist forces tried to assassinate the British ambassador. ”It was a matter of time until they captured the third one.”

Wood said his warnings were ignored in Washington, even when he stated his belief that al-Qaeda was in the final planning stages for the attack, and it became known that a senior al-Qaeda leader, Abu Anas al-Libi, had been dispatched to Libya to set up a terror network.

As he said in Congressional testimony, deputy ambassador Greg Hicks wondered by his requests for help during the attack were ignored. The Administration’s response has been to claim that no assets were in place to respond to that call for assistance. That hardly lets the Obama team off the hook. On the contrary, it’s more baffling and outrageous than ever that no contingency rescue plans were made. The security situation in Benghazi was shockingly inappropriate for the threat level. Wood said the Administration wouldn’t even take the simple step of relocating the consulate after its situation began deteriorating in the weeks before the attack.

Another new revelation in the “60 Minutes” report is the testimony of a former British soldier who uses the pseudonym “Morgan Jones.” He was in charge of training the unarmed – yes, unarmed - security guards at the consulate. He didn’t have anything to do with the armed militia hired by the State Department to respond to an attack, but they scared him to death. ”These guys are no good. You need to get ‘em out of here,” he told State, warning that they wouldn’t stand and fight if they came under fire. ”In the end I got quite bored of hearing my own voice say it.”

Sadly, Jones was right – the militia broke and ran, leaving the unarmed men he had trained to call for help that never would have come, if the Obama Administration had gotten its way. But as we all know, someone did come: the brave men from the CIA annex. Lara Logan of CBS News recalled how they “ignored orders to wait and raced to the compound, at times running and shooting their way through the streets just to get there. Inside the compound, they repelled a force of as many as sixty armed terrorists, and managed to save five American lives and recover the body of Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith. They were forced to fight their way out before they could find the ambassador.”

Jones infiltrated an al-Qaeda-controlled hospital on the night of the attack to get eyes on the body of his slain friend, Ambassador Chris Stevens. He also got into the compound that was under siege – taking down an al-Qaeda fighter who spotted him, with a quick application of his rifle butt to the terrorist’s face – and witnessed the mortar strike that killed former SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. Jones compared scoring three mortar hits on the roof of that building, in the dark, to “getting the basketball through the hoop over your shoulder,” identifying such precision as a result of “coordination, planning, training, experienced personnel… They knew what they were doing. That was a well-executed attack.”

That, of course, is not what Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the rest of their dishonest team told us. No one has yet been held accountable for what happened in Benghazi, and if Obama has his way, no one ever will be. No one who watches this CBS News report would trust Hillary Clinton to handle security for a Little League game. Perhaps the end of her presidential aspirations will be the closest anyone gets to answering for the blindness and dereliction of duty that got Ambassador Stevens, Woods, Doherty, and foreign service officer Sean Smith killed in Benghazi.

Morgan Jones said Smith expressed concerns about the security situation a week before the attack. Jones decided to keep his own fears to himself during that conversation. ”I didn’t want to worry him anymore, you know?” he told Lara Logan. ”He’s a nice guy. I sort of promised him he’d be OK.” He said he thinks about that promise “every day.” That’s a lot more thought than anyone in the Obama Administration evidently gave to Benghazi, beyond making plans to minimize the political damage and squeak through the 2012 election.