I have hesitated to write about the events in Libya until, as the President has continually suggested, all the facts are in. We have enough, now, and the picture they form is disgraceful. An American ambassador and three other Americans were murdered, and the Administration did nothing to help them. The real question, beyond the details, is why?
We now know that the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi had been attacked twice before the fatal raid, and that the ambassador and staff had repeatedly asked for increased security. We know that the Administration and the State Department had denied those requests because they did not wish to offend the sensibilities of the government (such as it is) in Libya. We know that other foreign authorities, such as the British Embassy and the Red Cross had pulled out of Benghazi because of the severe security threat, and that the American legation was the only one left, and that it was left virtually unprotected.
We know that the President's and the U.N. Ambassador's repeated claims that the fatal attack was the result of a demonstration gone bad were false. There was no demonstration, and the idea that protesters would bring automatic weapons, a mortar and rocket propelled grenades to a demonstration was, in any case, absurd. We now know that the existence of the video that Obama repeatedly claimed provoked the attack was not even known in Libya (the Libyan leader himself said so), and that the President knew that was the case, and still went on national television and before the U.N. claiming that the video was the cause.
We know that the attack, rather than the spontaneous outbreak of violence the President claimed it to be, was a concerted seven-hour-long assault, and that Administration officials watched it in real time on video sent by two drones overhead. We know that the ambassador requested increased security on the very day of the attack, and that three urgent requests for assistance during the attack were denied.
We know that two Navy Seals defied orders not to assist the staff at the consulate and in the nearby safe house and went to their defense, losing their lives as a result. We also know that they managed to save some American lives before they were killed. We know that these two men were heroes - honest-to-god heroes just like in the movies - and that their requests for assistance were denied. We know that the U.S. possessed security assets in nearby areas which could have been sent to rescue them, but they were withheld.
And we know that the U.N. Ambassador, the Secretary of State and the President lied about all of this.
We also know that, after the tragedy, the President referred to the murder of the Ambassador as being "not optimal," and that at the memorial service for one of the Seals, the Vice-President commented to the hero's father in a stage whisper about the size of his son's balls, and that when the President shook the father's hand, he could not look him in the eyes. It was, the father has said, "like shaking hands with a dead fish."
It becomes tedious to point out that if anything remotely like this had occurred under a Republican administration, the mainstream press would be howling it from every front page, website and cable channel. There would be strident demands for investigations, resignations and impeachment. We recall that when the Bush Administration was accused of leaking the name of a CIA officer (a case in which no one was injured or killed), the media demanded that people be sent to jail, and, indeed, one administration official was tried and imprisoned. Yet in this instance, in which American territory was attacked and American officials were murdered, the mainstream media has chosen largely to ignore what now appears as a disgusting and pathetic lack of leadership and panoply of lies.
All this brings us back to my initial question: Why? Why did the Obama Administration, that is to say, the President, choose to ignore the appeals for security from Libya, and even on the day of the attack and during the murderous assault, still refused to save the lives of an American ambassador and American citizens? And why, having failed to do so, did he and his officials lie so ardently and repeatedly about it?
The answer, of course, is that we are in the middle of an election campaign, and nothing is more important than getting Barack Obama re-elected. Nothing. Not the nation's security, not the truth, not the lives of our citizens. Nothing.
I remember when Chuck Colson, one of Richard Nixon's re-election campaign thugs, said that he would run over his own grandmother to get Nixon re-elected. Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, and eighteen months later forced to resign, and Colson and many other people (not including Nixon) went to prison.
Barack Obama has done worse than that: He, it now appears, allowed an American ambassador and three other Americans to die while his people literally watched on video. Then, by all accounts, he went to bed, and the next day, to a fundraising event in Las Vegas.
With regard to the coming election, nothing more needs to be said. Nothing.
