Do you ever feel like you’re seeing something completely different from everyone else? This morning the media is full of reports that the Benghazi committee’s hearing yesterday revealed “nothing new.” Did you know about Hillary’s e-mail to Chelsea and the comment to the Egyptian prime minister on September 12, saying it was a terrorist attack? Doesn’t that seem significant to anybody? Hello?
Bingo: ‘Two of Our Officers Were Killed in Benghazi by an Al-Queda-like Group’
Hillary Clinton in an e-mail to Chelsea Clinton, September 12, 2012:
“Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an al Qaeda-like group: The Ambassador, whom I handpicked and a young communications officer on temporary duty w a wife and two young children. Very hard day and I fear more of the same tomorrow.”
Then there’s a readout of a call between Hillary Clinton and Egyptian prime minister Hisham Kandil, where Hillary tells him, “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.”
Keep in mind, the night of the attack, as it was still going on, Hillary issued a statement declaring, “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.” Meaning the “it was all because of a video” explanation to the public originated in Foggy Bottom the night of September 11.
In Thursday’s hearing, Clinton said, “When I was speaking to the Egyptian prime minister or in the other two examples you showed, we had been told by Ansar al-Sharia [a militia group] that they took credit for it. It wasn’t until about 24 more hours later that they retracted taking credit for it.”
So when Ansar al-Sharia retracted taking credit for it, September 13, why did she then conclude that it was NOT a terror attack at all, and a protest over a video? Why did she find it so unthinkable that it was a terror attack – particularly when no one on the ground had ever reported any protest — and why did she go back to the immediate video explanation?
By September 14, she was declaring at the transfer of remains ceremony, “We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”
Charles Woods, the father of Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, said Clinton told him when his son’s body returned to Andrews Air Force Base, “We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
It was not until September 21 that Hillary Clinton uses the words “terrorist attack” to refer to Benghazi. So for the first ten days after the attack, we have a series of private comments from Hillary Clinton sounding quite emphatic that this was a terror attack, and then a series of public comments that blame it on an angry mob reacting to a video.
Our old friend Byron York thinks this is already “priced in” in the public’s mind: “The documents were still more evidence that the blame-it-on-the-video story was lies and spin. But the public has known for a while that it was lies and spin. It seems unlikely to strike many Americans as very big news.”
If the American public knows that it was lied to about a terror attack, and doesn’t really care… then maybe we are doomed.