In yet another story that you won’t find in the New York Times, Charlie Spiering in the Washington Examiner reported that Hillary Clinton was scheduled to meet President Obama at the White House today “as more damaging details about the terrorist attack against a United States consulate in Libya emerge.”
Yesterday, the State Department revealed that the attack was “unprecedented” and wasn’t preceded by a protest over the controversial YouTube video, directly contradicting explanation of the attack by the Obama administration.
Their story is unraveling, and only the acquiescence of the mainstream press has kept it from becoming a full-blown scandal. So what did the president and his secretary of state discuss today? Foreign affairs? Or better lies? My guess is better lies.
Clinton’s State Department, and therefore in all probability the White House, had forewarning of at least a growing danger when “foreign fighters” began flooding over the Egyptian border prior to the attacks. And, worse than doing nothing, they actually prevented security from being beefed up, though they had been warned that the level was “inappropriately low.”
Back to Spiering:
Meanwhile, Robert Gibbs, this morning tried to minimize the damage, defending U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s assertion that the attack was sparked by the YouTube video.Gibbs admitted that Rice was wrong, but insisted that it was based on intelligence briefings and that she would never “deliberately mislead” anyone.
Oops. Now the State Department has disavowed even that fatuous denial.
In an unusual display of disunity, State Department officials have disowned remarks by one of their top officials, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, regarding her explanation of the deadly terrorist assault on U.S. diplomats in Libya in September. Not only did they say Rice’s characterization of those attacks as “spontaneous” was wrong, but also, they said that assessment was never the conclusion of the State Department at any point in time.
This is getting to the point where it’s worth a step back in time, to mere weeks after the September 11 attacks—the first September 11—when Rep. Cynthia McKinney began what would soon become an avalanche of accusation and innuendo directed at President Bush:
“We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11. What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11?”Farfetched as the claim may have seemed–the utterance of a leftist conspiracy wacko–the Georgia congresswoman was the first but would not be the last to accuse President Bush of having purposefully ignored intelligence that predicted the imminent use of hijacked planes as missiles.Echoed Senator Hillary Clinton soon thereafter–from the Senate floor, no less: “What did Bush know and when did he know it?”Ditto Howard Dean. The then-presidential candidate passed along the “theory”–as he called it–on WAMU radio that Bush “was warned ahead of time by the Saudis.” (Later came the pronouncements of former Nixon aide John Dean. Promoting a book about the Bush administration titled Worse Than Watergate, the convicted felon wrote that the president “likely” ignored “the potential of terrorists [to fly] airplanes into skyscrapers.”)A headline in the New York Times declared, “Bush Was Warned Bin Laden Wanted to Hijack Planes,” which was what the Washington Post confirmed with its “Bush Was Told of Hijacking Dangers.” These stories, among many, referred to comments by co-chair of the 9-11 commission Thomas Kean, synopsizing the first findings which suggested that the attacks could have been prevented.The clamor inevitably reached the morning TV chat fests (Katie Couric: “What did Bush know and when did he know it?”) and the rest of the zeitgeist, growing so pervasive that it sounded like hillside coyotes celebrating a kill. Its apotheosis would later appear in the person of Richard Clarke, former National Security Council chief of counter-terrorism. His bestselling book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, received much media attention for his claims that the president and his team had remained willfully ignorant of the threat posed by al Qaeda.
Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it, Madame Secretary?
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