There's a good reason the White House is trying to downplay the upcoming hearings on Benghazi. There's a reason they have spokeshole Jay Carney saying 'Benghazi was a long time ago' . It's obvious why the White House is illegally threatening whistle blowers who want to come forward and testify.
The more that comes out, the worse this smells:
Fresh evidence in the form of newly released e-mails reveals that the State Department had its fingers all over the attempted coverup, with a senior apparatchnik managing the talking points and saying clearly that her superiors were 'unhappy with implications they'd ignored warnings.'
As intelligence officials pieced together the puzzle of events unfolding in Libya, they concluded even before the assaults had ended that al Qaeda-linked terrorists were involved. Senior administration officials, however, sought to obscure the emerging picture and downplay the significance of attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. The frantic process that produced the changes to the talking points took place over a 24-hour period just one day before Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made her now-famous appearances on the Sunday television talk shows.
That senior apparatchnik, by the way, turns out to be State Department flack Victoria Nuland, who lied to reporters in claiming that Susan Rice's Sunday Talking Points accurately reflected the government's "initial assessment"...even though Victoria Nuland personally had the "initial assessment" changed to suit her "superiors'" political worries!
Election time, you know.
These e-mails were turned over to the House and Senate Intelligence committees as part of a deal in order to allow John Brennan, President Obama's choice for head of our CIA to be confirmed. Part of the agreement was that the committees would be allowed to just review the e-mails, not actually take possession of them..which is quite a giveaway right there:
If the House report provides an accurate and complete depiction of the emails, it is clear that senior administration officials engaged in a wholesale rewriting of intelligence assessments about Benghazi in order to mislead the public. [...]The article goes on to give the seamy details on how the State Department and the White House cooked reports and intel to cover their culpability and come up with the 'it was the video' narrative that turned out to be such horse manure. It even shows how the drafts of the Talking Points were edited to reflect 'concerns'
Within hours of the initial attack on the U.S. facility, the State Department Operations Center sent out two alerts. The first, at 4:05 p.m. (all times are Eastern Daylight Time), indicated that the compound was under attack; the second, at 6:08 p.m., indicated that Ansar al Sharia, an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group operating in Libya, had claimed credit for the attack. According to the House report, these alerts were circulated widely inside the government, including at the highest levels. The fighting in Benghazi continued for another several hours, so top Obama administration officials were told even as the fighting was taking place that U.S. diplomats and intelligence operatives were likely being attacked by al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. A cable sent the following day, September 12, by the CIA station chief in Libya, reported that eyewitnesses confirmed the participation of Islamic militants and made clear that U.S. facilities in Benghazi had come under terrorist attack. It was this fact, along with several others, that top Obama officials would work so hard to obscure.
And even more is going to come out during the hearings.
Gee, Mrs. Clinton...if it didn't make a difference, why did you and your pals in DC lie about it?
I'm sure we'd all like to know. Certainly the families of those dead Americans would.
A great piece of reporting by the Weekly Standard's Stephen F. Hayes.
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