It’s too bad the White House press briefing was on Air Force One today, because watching Jay Carney try to spin Mark Hosenball’s Reuters scoop would have been fun. Unfortunately we’ll have to make due with just a transcript:
“There was a variety of information coming in,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday on Air Force One. “The whole point of an intelligence community and what they do is to assess strands of information and make judgements about what happened and who was responsible.”
“This is an open source, unclassified email about a posting on a Facebook site,” Carney said. “I would also note that within a few hours the organization itself claimed that it had not been responsible. Neither should be taken as fact. That is why there is an investigation.”
Hillary Clinton also dismissed the story, accusing reporters of “cherry-picking” information:
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday a Facebook post in which an Islamic militant group claimed credit for a recent attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya did not constitute hard evidence of who was responsible.
“Posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence. I think it just underscores how fluid the reporting was at the time and continued for some time to be,” Clinton said during an appearance with the Brazilian foreign minister at the State Department.
A single posting on Facebook isn’t a smoking gun. But apparently it was considered noteworthy enough for the State Department’s Operations Center to send White House, Pentagon, FBI and intelligence officials an email alert about it in the critical early hours of the attack. It’s not as if the State Department was recklessly blasting out random bits of gossip and speculation, either. According to the timeline in the Reuters piece, this appears to be the third message they sent out in a span of two hours.
There’s also the inconvenient fact that the email turned out to be correct. Ansar al-Sharia is the main group suspected behind the attack. So whether or not there was a “variety of information coming in,” as Jay Carney said, is irrelevant. Why did the administration dismiss information that correctly linked Ansar al-Sharia to the attack, and instead publicly promote inaccurate information about a “spontaneous protest”? Either they completely dropped the ball, or they were doing some cherry-picking themselves.
The comments by Jay Carney and Hillary Clinton are totally beside the point. For two weeks after the event, the Administration- at the highest levels- kept on promoting the false image of a mob reaction to a video- and all the time they knew they were telling a blatant lie- now that is relevant!
My understanding is that there also were six hours of distress calls — which were sent over frequencies that the White House Situation Room monitors — and didn't involve Facebook. n nIf this were a Republican President, we would have the media screaming for transcripts of all the incoming traffic and the rest. But since it is Obama, we can all drink the Grape CoolAide and ignore everything else….
Watching the Obama administration dance this way and that, trying every rhetorical tactic save honesty to explain away this lapse, I thought about the original 9/11 catastrophe and how President Bush and his people handled it. Within a few hours of the attack, we were told the straight, hard truth, even though the enormity of the disaster would have given Bush a reasonable excuse to withold details until more was known about it. After all, being hit so hard by a well-known terrorist organization like Al-Qaeda was not a fact likely to burnish the reputations of the new president and his subordinates. Nevertheless, we were told everything that could be told without compromising security, and none of it later turned out to be self-serving lies. n nImagine the b.s.stories this administration would have shovelled had they been in charge back then!