Seven things we learned. Too bad we couldn’t learn it before the election.
[Update a few minutes later]
And the Pentagon continues to stonewall.
[Update a few more minutes later]
The Benghazi patsy:
A violation of probation, though, usually produces a court summons and doesn’t typically lead to more jail time unless it involves an offense that would be worth prosecuting in its own right under federal standards. Not for Nakoula.
This wasn’t a case of nailing Al Capone on tax evasion. As Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute points out, Al Capone’s underlying offense was racketeering and gangland killings. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s underlying offense wasn’t an underlying offense. He exercised his First Amendment rights.
His case has symbolic significance in the ongoing battle over whether the Muslim world will embrace modernity, and the panoply of freedoms associated with it, or whether it will continue to slide backward by adopting blasphemy laws punishing expressions deemed offensive to Islam. The administration has been dismayingly willing to accommodate the latter tendency. Nakoula’s jail time appears indistinguishable from what the 56-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, devoted to pushing blasphemy laws around the world, calls “deterrent punishment” for “Islamophobia.”
His video, which did spark violent protests in the Muslim world by the kind of people who are looking for an excuse to protest, should have been an object lesson in freedom. Obama should have explained that our culture is full of disreputable film directors and producers. Some of them are even honored by the Academy.
Instead, Nakoula ended up the patsy in a tawdry coverup.
They had to maintain the narrative. As Glenn says, House investigators need to subpoena any communications between Washington and the local law enforcement in LA. Maybe we can find a whistleblower in the sheriff’s office.
in her first public statement on September 12, [Clinton] blamed the movie
Nope.
Obama himself blamed the movie repeatedly
Nope.
The right seems to be operating under a mass delusion about what Clinton and Obama actually said.
in her first public statement on September 12, [Clinton] blamed the movie
Yep.
Oh wait, she actually did so on the day of the attack as well. Is that what you meant Jim?
No doubt Baghdad Jim will also claim that Obama (seen here (I haven’t looked for a more authoritative source; the White House web site probably doesn’t have Letterman transcripts) didn’t actually say (I’ve taken the liberty of eliding some of the text but not altering Obama’s actual words) “Here’s what happened. […] You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, […] who made an extremely offensive video directed at — at Mohammed and Islam — […m]aking fun of the Prophet Mohammed. And so, this caused great offense in much of the Muslim world. But what also happened, extremists and terrorists used this as an excuse to attack a variety of our embassies, including the one, the consulate in Libya.”
No doubt Baghdad Jim will say that the last sentence isn’t related to the preceding ones, that the attack was coincidental to the movie. “See, people were offended by the movie, and by chance, at the same time, extremists attacked the consulate.”
He said they were terrorists who used the movie as an excuse, which is basically the opposite of blaming the attack on the movie.
That statement, like the other one, doesn’t say that she blames the video for the attack. She doesn’t claim to know the cause.
Is English comprehension really this difficult?
Jim – carefully read what Obama said:
“But what also happened, extremists and terrorists used this as an excuse to attack a variety of our embassies, including the one, the consulate in Libya.””
EMBASSIES…..INCLUDING THE ONE, THE CONSULATE IN LIBYA.
This demolishes two of your more moronic positions:
1) That Benghazi was a consulate and not an embassy and
2) that Obama (clinton et al) never blamed the video for the attack.
If there’s a reading comprehension problem here it’s not Rick’s.
This is unclear:
“1) That Benghazi was a consulate and not an embassy and”
To be more clear, the Jimmers argument that is demolished was the bizarro notion that since he used the word “embassy” and the facility at Benghazi is a consulate, that Obama (and Clinton) wasn’t trying to state the video cause the attack at the consulate.
It demolishes nothing. Obama was speaking off the cuff on a chat show, and even so he clarifies that Benghazi was a consulate, not an embassy. That hardly supports your contention that when Clinton says “embassy” in carefully prepared remarks, she really means “consulate”.
And Obama’s statement does not blame the video for the attack, it blames terrorists for using the video as an excuse. That’s an explicit statement that terrorism, not the video, was the cause of the attack.
it blames terrorists for using the video as an excuse…
In other words, no video, no attack, according to the president.
You’re amazing.
” Obama was speaking off the cuff on a chat show…”
That is completely irrelevant. He is the President of the US. He just said that the video was used as an excuse for the Benghazi attack.
“That hardly supports your contention that when Clinton says “embassy” in carefully prepared remarks, she really means “consulate”.”
Red Herring…I am not using the Leno show statement to support or deny the clear and plain English that Clinton used.
Rand ably demolished your last moronic statement…..
Why you keep ignoring the fact that they (Obama et al) absolutely knew for a fact the video had NOTHING whatsoever to do with the attack and yet made repeated statements about the video endlessly is beyond logic ….other than you feel compelled to defend the Messiah.
Jim explain this:
1) The moment Obama and Clinton and all of their minions (Carney, Rice, etc.) heard about the attack for the first time they knew for a fact the video had nothing to do with it…..no one used it as an excuse for anything and they knew that….
..so explain why they they kept talking about it for days and days and days?
2) Why did they scrub any reference to AQ from the CIA report?
Baghdad Jim will say that “Some 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” didn’t specifically mention the movie so it doesn’t count.
It’s clearly referencing the movie, but it isn’t blaming the movie for the attack. The preceding sentence is explicit: “We are working to determine the precise motivations and methods of those who carried out this assault.”
Does anyone other than the State Department and reporters afterwards ever reference the movie prior to the attack?
Well ABC News finally decided to get on the bandwagon:
“….12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress ”
“White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.
That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.”
“State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland raised specific objections to this paragraph drafted by the CIA in its earlier versions of the talking points:
“The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”
In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned …”
The paragraph was entirely deleted.”
They knew (of course).
If Victoria Nuland is more concerned about taking criticism rather than telling the truth, she should be fired. What I keep seeing with Benghazi, the Ft. Hood shooter trial, and most recently with the Boston bombers is a systemic effort to hide the association with terrorism, so as to also hide the failures to pickup on terrorist attack. The real value of the Benghazi hearing is pulling out this systemic effort and finding out who is doing it, without affecting two ongoing trials. We need to understand if what is happening in the various bureaucracies is the recreation of the Gorelick Wall between Department of State, Justice, and Homeland Security.
Nuland was concerned about protecting her “building’s leadership” .
And, the attempt to distract people’s attention away from organized terrorism goes beyond the several examples you gave, Lelend. For instance, Nanny Bloomberg said the christmas bomber was a lone wolf.
attention away from organized terrorism goes beyond the several examples you gave
And the wall extends apparently between FBI and local police, based on stories today out of Boston. There is no question that Congress should be investigating why we the administration is downplaying terrorism. In the 90’s, the US ignored terrorist attacks on embassies. It wasn’t until 2001 the connection was made.