“With all due respect, the fact is, we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or because of guys out for a walk one night who decide to kill some Americans, what difference, at this point, does it make?”
Thus did Hillary Clinton dismiss the question of why she blamed the attack on our Benghazi compound, resulting in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others, on a purportedly “spontaneous” protest in response to a “disgusting” anti-Muslim video found only on YouTube.
Just weeks earlier, Mrs. Clinton thought the genesis of the attack was important enough to spend a great deal of her time identifying and denouncing it. The State Department reportedly spent $70,000 of its scarce resources to air commercials in Pakistan condemning the YouTube video.
Now Mrs. Clinton would like everyone to drop the subject.
The fact is, however, that the Benghazi tragedy illustrates the half-baked nature of the Arab Spring policy she has implemented, her failed management of the State Department, and her apparently treacherous qualities as a leader. The picture is not flattering.
With new pieces of the puzzle being supplied almost daily, two conclusions are coming into focus. First, the “blame the video” narrative originated with Hillary Clinton. Second, there is every reason to believe that Clinton herself knew it was false from the word go.
Hillary Clinton was the first senior Obama Administration official to publicly blame the video for the Benghazi attack. In prepared remarks at the State Department on September 12, Mrs. Clinton suggested that “[s]ome have sought to justify this vicious behavior, along with the protest that took place at our Embassy in Cairo yesterday, as a response to inflammatory material posted on the internet.” Francis Urquart would blush.
We can tell where the video narrative did not come from: the career Foreign Service. On the night of September 11, State’s top diplomat for the region, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones, sent an email to Clinton, her chief of staff Cheryl Mills (a former member of her husband’s legal team and not a Foreign Service officer), State spokesperson Victoria Nuland, and Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy, reporting that “the group that carried out the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.” Greg Hicks testified that he personally briefed Clinton during a 2 a.m. call on the night of the attack. Hicks did not mention a demonstration spinning out of control, he said, because there wasn’t one. Instead, he told Clinton, it was an attack, plain and simple.
If the assault on the consulate was the result of a spontaneous protest, over an internet video, the responsible career Foreign Service officers, including Mr. Hicks and Ms. Jones, would have reported this to Secretary Clinton. They did not.
The White House did not initially adopt the video narrative. In a September 12 press “gaggle” on Air Force One in Las Vegas, Jay Carney said only that the incident was still “under investigation.” Carney was more concerned with echoing President Obama’s charge that Mitt Romney had played politics with the Benghazi tragedy.
By September 13, Mrs. Clinton blamed the video for the Benghazi assault explicitly. Speaking at a State Department meeting with the Moroccan President, she pinned not only the Benghazi attack, but the violent outbursts spreading across the Arab Middle East, on Muslim popular outrage triggered by the “disgusting and reprehensible,” “deeply cynical” video. In that day’s gaggle, Carney merely referred to and repeated Clinton’s remarks.
On September 14, Mrs. Clinton went all in. Speaking at Joint Base Andrews, in front of cameras, flag-draped caskets, and the families of four murdered Americans, she said, “[w]e’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with.” According to the parents of the former Navy SEALs at the ceremony, Clinton also privately blamed the video for their sons’ deaths, promising to “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
Now the White House was also fully on board. Jay Carney blamed the video for the attacks at that day’s press conference, and the President himself would go on to denounce the video and its “shadowy” creator in important policy venues like “The View,” “Late Night with David Letterman” and the United Nations General Assembly.
Then, during her infamous round of the Sunday talk shows on September 16, Susan Rice insisted that the video was “in fact” the cause of the Benghazi attack. Inconveniently, the Libyan President had just publicly asserted that Benghazi was a pre-planned, terrorist assault.
When DCM Hicks, shocked by Rice’s statements, asked Assistant Secretary of State Jones why Susan Rice had blamed the video, Jones curtly told him to drop the subject.
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of Hicks’ testimony. If indeed an intelligence assessment supported the video story, why didn’t Ms. Jones just say so? Mr. Hicks, then the acting Chief of Mission in Tripoli, surely had a “need to know” and every security clearance necessary to be told. Instead, he got “Don’t ask."
This is where the flap over the Benghazi “talking points” -- purportedly the source of the bad “best assessment” provided by “the intelligence community”-- discloses another critical piece of the story: the video narrative predates the draft talking points, but was never included in them. This is key to identifying the source of the phony “video” narrative.
As a preface, a couple of things need to be kept in mind:
First, the talking points were prepared at the request of, and for use by, the members of the House Intelligence Committee. In other words, this was an opportunity for the Obama Administration to influence what key members of Congress would say about the attack, and that is how the White House and State Department looked at it. The emails show that the White House worried about the “messaging ramifications” of “wrong information” coming out of Congress. State did not want to give Members of Congress points that “could be abused . . . to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings”. It was only late Saturday night that a member of Susan Rice’s staff asked for a copy of the points for her to use on the Sunday talk shows.
Second, while the Obama administration sources continually refer to the “talking points” as a CIA or “intelligence community” product, this is not accurate. CIA may have held the drafting pen, but the points were an “interagency” (committee) product. Where there is disagreement between agencies, the White House is the final arbiter.
The emails recently pried from the Executive Branch show this. It was Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser, who played the arbiter role and who, on September 15, gave Susan Rice the go-ahead to use the talking points.
The first draft was not circulated until 11 a.m. on Friday, September 14 -- well after Mrs. Clinton had publicly described the Benghazi attack as the fatal result of a spontaneous demonstration provoked by an anti-Muslim internet video.
Notably, the first draft (1) explicitly referred to previous terrorist threats to Western diplomats in Benghazi, (2) stated as fact (“we do know”) that Islamic militants affiliated with al Qaeda had participated in the attack, and (3) made no mention of the video as a cause. If the “best assessment” of the intelligence community was that a Benghazi demonstration against an anti-Muslim video had spun out of control, then why wasn’t that included in talking points the CIA drafted nearly two days after the Secretary of State had gone public with that explanation?
The answer is now clear: that was not the assessment of the intelligence community. In fact, CIA had been directed not to make such an assessment. A September 14 email from CIA General Counsel to staff reminded them that on “express instructions from NSS/DOJ/FBI, in light of the criminal investigation, we are not to generate statements with assessments as to who did this, etc., -- even internally, not to mention for public release.” (emphasis added). In other words, because the Obama Administration was treating the Benghazi attack as a criminal matter, the CIA had been instructed to leave the determination of who was responsible to the White House, DOJ and FBI.
Drafts of the talking points included references to CIA warnings of threats to Benghazi, and to the participation of Islamic militants in the Cairo protests and attack in Benghazi. This was not satisfactory to “building leadership” at State; Victoria Nuland candidly wrote that State was afraid this would make them look bad and fuel Congressional criticism. Late on Friday, Ben Rhodes reminded everyone of the “significant policy and messaging ramifications” at stake, and that the views of all agencies had to be taken into account.
When the talking points were finalized Saturday night, lo and behold, all references to the CIA’s previous warnings and the participation of al Qaeda affiliated Islamic militants were removed -- even after one person involved in the drafting noted that "FBI says AQ [not AQIM] was involved." What had been initially described as knowledge that al Qaeda affiliated terrorists had participated in the “attack” on Benghazi became mere “indications” that “extremists” of no apparent ideological flavor had participated in “violent demonstrations.”
So the final draft of the talking points did not blame the non-existent Benghazi demonstrations the mysteriously influential YouTube video. And, notably, the newly released emails show that on Saturday, September 15, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) told the ranking House Intelligence Committee Democrat that while the Middle East was a “permissive environment for terrorists” and “we have some indicators al Qa’ida and other groups are seeking to establish a presence in Libya” the DNI was “very cautious about drawing any firm conclusions at this point with regard to the identification and motivation of the attackers.” Indeed, the DNI's message refers five times to the "attack" or "attackers" and never to any "demonstration."
In short, nothing in the information released to date suggests that anyone in “the intelligence community” made an assessment blaming the Benghazi attack on a video-provoked demonstration. Quite the contrary, it appeared to those same agencies that there was substantial reason to believe that al Qaeda affiliated terrorists were involved.
Nevertheless, Susan Rice took to the TV to assert that “[t]he information, the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack. That what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video.” A month later, in an October 15 with The Washington Post, that Amb. Rice would blame this “best assessment” on the allegedly faulty work of the “intelligence community.”
The emails now show these statements were false on three counts: (1) the “intelligence community” had not then made an assessment, and indeed had been forbidden to do so; (2) the talking points said nothing more than that “currently available information suggests” that the attack evolved out of demonstrations; and (3) the talking points never attributed the attack to demonstrations provoked by the video.
So where did the “video” narrative come from? There is only one apparent source: Hillary Clinton. If she didn’t think it up herself, she certainly approved it, and she was its first and most diligent proponent.
Now back to the question Mrs. Clinton intended to be rhetorical. What difference does it make whether Ambassador Stevens was murdered by “guys out for a walk,” or by an organized al Qaeda affiliate executing a pre-planned assault -- presaged by the CIA -- on the anniversary of September 11?
What difference does it make whether the Obama Administration’s “lead from behind” Middle East policy, orchestrated by Clinton, has not produced flowering democracies, but a stubborn, volatile mess? Whether this policy, and not the Mesmerizing influence of an obscure video, unleashed a wave of violent uprisings that reflects a growing Islamist anti-Americanism?
What difference does it make that senior officials of the United States Government, including the Secretary of State and the President, would propagate an elaborate but absurd fiction to obscure the disturbing differences between their campaign “narrative” and reality?
Hillary Clinton thought it made a difference. And she’s right.
