The New Obama Doctrine: Lies, Damnable Lies (Open Thread)

© Miri WTPOTUS September 24, 2012

How does the Washington DC fire department keep up? Surely they’ve been called multiple times to the White House, the State Department, and the studios of CNN, MSNBC, and all of the other complicit, mendacious, mainstream media organizations, to put out the fires in the pants of Barack Hussein Obama, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his UN Ambassador Susan Rice, his Press Secretary Jay Carney, and his senior campaign advisor Robert Gibbs.

The lies have been coming fast and furious from these current and former public employees (who are supposed to answer to us), as well as from other Obama defenders and apologists. It’s getting pretty bad when even the representatives of the left on FOX News (in this case Kirsten Powers) are appalled at all of the lies, going so far as to say that the media take their “marching orders” from Obama to help him to create and maintain his preferred “narrative” (the one that must be created in order to hide the truth from the voters.) h/t Bridgette

We the People were told that our fellow citizens did NOT die in Benghazi because of a preplanned terrorist attack on the anniversary 9/11. A lie! [emphasis added to all quotes]

The administration’s story itself has recently begun to shift, with Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, telling Congress on Wednesday that the attackers may have had links to al Qaeda and Carney characterizing the incident as a “terrorist attack.” …

But other indications that the White House’s early narrative was faulty are also beginning to emerge. One current U.S. intelligence officer working on the investigation into the incident [said] … that the attackers had staked out and monitored the U.S. consulate in Benghazi before the attack, a move that suggests pre-planning.

What’s more, two U.S. intelligence officials [said] … that the intelligence community is currently analyzing an intercept between a Libyan politician whose sympathies are with al Qaeda and the Libyan militia known as the February 17 Brigade—which had been charged with providing local security to the consulate. In the intercept, the Libyan politician apparently asks an officer in the brigade to have his men stand down for a pending attack—another piece of evidence implying the violence was planned in advance.

Now that’s an astounding piece of news–that Libyan militias were supposed to be protecting our consulate, but an Al Qaeda-connected politician may have ordered them to allow the attack to happen! That fact and a few other facts, if widely reported, would shock every American. What other facts? That the “rules of engagement” required the Libyans who guarded our consulate to carry unloaded weapons and forbade them to load their weapons, even if they had bullets!

The overblown outcry about Mitt Romney’s hasty statement that criticized the president was a coordinated, planned distraction from the truth of what happened in Benghazi. A distraction that was probably orchestrated by the White House.

The huge outcry about that mendaciously edited, incomplete “secret video” of Romney was also a distraction from the truth of what really happened in Libya. Bread and circuses, folks. Bread and circuses. Anything to keep the public amused and ill-informed.

The next distraction/deflection has already been devised, and the complicit, mendacious media are already picking up the hue and cry, excoriating CNN (poetic justice) for going against the alleged wishes of terrorist victim and late Ambassador J. Christopher Steven’s family by reporting (truthfully) that he was alarmed about the rise in Islamic extremism in Libya and knew that he was on an Al Qaeda “hit list”.

For once, CNN did the right thing. How did they come to know these facts? They found the ambassador’s journal in the burned-out consulate; they knew what Stevens wrote in it; and they knew that this was extremely timely and newsworthy information that not only the People but also their representatives in Congress NEED TO KNOW. What we needed to hear was at least some of the TRUTH about what REALLY happened in Benghazi.

But this story is also being derailed by planned deflection. The focus is being shifted from what the ambassador knew and feared, to the purported “unethical” behavior of CNN for not repressing the contents of his “personal” diary, instead paraphrasing the important facts they gleaned from it concerning conditions on the ground in Libya. This is what was to be suppressed, not out of respect for Steven’s family, but to protect the Obama administration from the backdraft of truth!

Three days after he was killed, CNN found a journal belonging to late U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens. The journal was found on the floor of the largely unsecured consulate compound where he was fatally wounded.

CNN notified Stevens’ family about the journal within hours after it was discovered and at the family’s request provided it to them via a third party.

The journal consists of just seven pages of handwriting in a hard-bound book.

For CNN, the ambassador’s writings served as tips about the situation in Libya, and in Benghazi in particular. CNN took the newsworthy tips and corroborated them with other sources.

A source familiar with Stevens’ thinking told CNN earlier this week that, in the months leading up to his death, the late ambassador worried about what he called the security threats in Benghazi and a rise in Islamic extremism.

Stevens died on September 11, along with three other Americans, when the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi came under attack amid a large protest about a U.S.-made film that mocked the Muslim Prophet Mohammed.

We now know that their last paragraph contains several other falsehoods. First, there was NO protest in Benghazi that night. What happened was a well-planned terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11. There was a protest in Egypt.  However, that protest was not because of this never-seen film that allegedly mocked Islam. The Egyptians were commemorating the Islamist “victory” on 9/11/01, protesting drone strikes, and attempting to pressure the U.S. into releasing the Blind Sheikh.

And what about the film? The Obama administration has sought to explain nearly everything that has happened over the past two weeks as a response to the video. President Obama denounced it during his remarks at the memorial for the four Americans killed in Libya. So did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. White House spokesman Jay Carney has mentioned it almost daily. At the end of last week, the United States spent $70,000 to buy ads in Pakistan to distance the U.S. government from its message.

That’s ironic. In its effort to deflect blame for the unrest, the administration has given more attention to this obscure film than it ever would have gotten if they’d simply ignored it. It’s true that radical Islamists used the film to help populate the 9/11 protests at the U.S. embassy in Cairo. But they also told fellow radicals to join in a protest of the continued detention of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh who was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. And some of the others who gathered were “Ultras”—soccer hooligans looking for trouble.

The American embassy in Cairo first drew attention to the film in its statement. And the administration—after initially distancing itself from that statement—has made it the centerpiece of its public relations campaign ever since, as protests spread to more than 20 countries. The result: Every Muslim with access to media is now aware of a bizarre video that had a few thousand views on YouTube on September 10.

That’s exactly what the radicals wanted, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the reporting on Egypt. The focus on the film was an “information operation” by jihadists designed to generate rage against America. If he’s right, it worked.

Barack Obama came to office promising to repair relations with the Islamic world. What he couldn’t accomplish by the mere fact of his presidency, through his name and his familiarity with Islam, he would achieve through “smart diplomacy.”

Instead, over the last four years, and particularly the last two weeks, the defining characteristics of his foreign policy have been mendacity, incompetence, and, yes, stupidity.

As the administration’s lies began to be refuted, they came up with a video allegedly showing Libyans finding Ambassador Stevens, alone in the empty consulate, locked in a “safe room”. The “narrative” that came along with the video was that these Libyan rescuers shouted in relief that the Ambassador was still alive, praised Allah, and called for an ambulance. However, those were more lies. These were looters who shouted with joy, as Professor Phyllis Chesler explains:

I have been looking at the photos and the brief video of Ambassador Stevens and I have spoken to two different Arabists, who assure me that the mob dragging Steven’s body are chanting a song of victory over one’s enemies and are praising God for it.

What other lies are we being told by our employees? We’re being lied to by the very people who are supposed to work for us and who are supposed to keep our representatives informed. Is it true that the Ambassador’s body was missing for twelve hours and that he was sodomized? Will We the People ever be told the truth about how Ambassador Stevens died?

The Weekly Standard reminds us that this is not the first time that the Obama Administration has outright lied to us about Islamic terror directed at our country’s citizens:

On December 28, 2009, three days after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate explosives in his underwear aboard an airliner over Detroit, President Obama told the country that the incident was the work of “an isolated extremist.” It wasn’t. Abdulmutallab was trained, directed, and financed by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a fact he shared with investigators early in his interrogation.

The same thing happened less than six months later, after Faisal Shahzad attempted to blow up his Nissan Pathfinder in Times Square. Two days following the botched attack, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano took to the Sunday shows to dismiss reports of a conspiracy and insisted that the attempted bombing was just a “one-off” by a single attacker. It wasn’t. A week later, after much of the information had leaked, Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged that the United States had “evidence that shows that the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack. We know that they helped facilitate it, we know that they probably helped finance it and that he was working at their direction.”

In each instance, top administration officials quickly downplayed or dismissed the seriousness of the events, only to acknowledge, after the shock had worn off and the media had turned to other news, that their initial stories were incorrect. Whether it was because the attempted attacks were unsuccessful or because the media simply lost interest, the administration largely escaped serious criticism for making claims that turned out to be wrong.

These claims aren’t just “wrong.” They’re lies. Outright lies. Mendacious lies. Deliberate lies. Disrespectful lies.

This administration feeds lies to the willing media and doesn’t extend to our representatives the courtesy of giving them as much detail.  (It was after the terrorist attack that Mitt Romney finally began to get intelligence briefings. One can only wonder if what they tell him is truthful.)

Senate Republicans are furious the Obama administration rebuffed their attempts to learn details of the Benghazi attack, only to give the coveted information to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Senators say they were rebuffed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when they pressed for more information about the attack that killed U.S. envoy Christopher Stephens in Libya.

“That is the most useless, worthless briefing I have attended in a long time,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told reporters after the closed-door session.

GOP lawmakers were incensed to find many of the details they tried to learn Thursday were in a front-page article in The Times the following morning.

“I was very disappointed in the briefing yesterday, too. The bottom line is, we asked questions like, ‘How many people were at the Benghazi consulate?’ You pick up The New York Times and you get a blow-by-blow description of what supposedly went on,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

One gets the distinct impression, however, that what was fed to the media is the “narrative” that Obama wants the PEOPLE to believe. They don’t feed this narrative to Congress because there may be repercussions if they lie to them. Compare what was said to the media early on to what Matthew Olsen told Senators:  Olsen told them the truth–that it looked like a terrorist attack. Why? Was it because it’s a crime to lie to the Senate, but it’s not a crime to lie to the media? Lying to the representatives of the people could also get your boss impeached. Lying to the voters might get your boss booted right out of the White House. But the truth might get him booted, too.  Thus, the reason for the lies in the first place.

How many more lies will We the People accept from this administration? Will all the citizens of the United States finally WISE UP about Obama? We’ll find out in less than two months. We the People need to hold Obama’s feet to the fire and demand the truth about Benghazi.

btw, did Representative Michele Bachmann and those other members of Congress ever get answers to their questions about potential infiltration of our government by the Muslim Brotherhood? Exactly how did Huma Abedin get a security clearance?

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Open Thread!