Did the State Department receive warnings on September 11 that the Benghazi consulate was being cased for an attack? FNC’s Jennifer Griffin reports today that two cables sent from Ambassador Chris Stevens’s team to Washington the morning of the attack expressed concern that Libyan police had been seen photographing the compound earlier that day (h/t Hot Air):
Reports Griffin:
“Two State Department cables show that Stevens’s team warned Washington that at 6:43 a.m. in the morning they had concerns that members of the Libyan police sent to guard them were photographing the compound. …
U.S. intelligence officials confirm to Fox that in fact there were reports from the ground in Benghazi three hours before the attack on the consulate that a Libyan militia was gathering weapons and gathering steam. That was three hours before the consulate was attacked at 9:47 p.m. on September 11.”
There is a lot here, but first, the cables. Max cited a Foreign Policy article earlier, which reported on draft letters from Stevens’ team to the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, warning that local police sent to guard the consulate had been photographing the building. But this is the first time we’ve heard that Foggy Bottom was actually sent cables about it. With the history of attacks on the consulate and other foreign missions in the area, the warnings from security officials, and the 9/11 anniversary, this evidence of local “guards” casing the compound should have been more than enough to raise alarms at the State Department.
Even if Washington officials didn’t see or receive the cables until after it was too late, that still raises more questions about why the administration would have assumed the attack was part of a “spontaneous demonstration” in response to the Cairo protests. The photographs were reportedly taken at 6:43 a.m., well before the protests erupted in Egypt.
Then there’s Griffin’s report that U.S. intelligence officials had word of Libyan militias gathering arms three hours before the attack. If so, was anyone at the State Department informed? Where exactly was the communications breakdown?
The Obama administration’s foot-dragging on this has ensured we won’t know the full story until after the election. But their initial claims seem more implausible by the day.
The Obama news media are doing a good job of not reporting the Benghazi Consulate attack. If Obama is reelected we will never know the truth. The media will lie and spin the story to protect Obama.
"The FBI has never found the individual who allegedly asked two Yemenis to take photos of federal buildings in downtown New York in May 2001, an episode that was mentioned in an intelligence report given President Bush little more than a month before the attacks on the World Trade Center, according to government officials." n nConservatives are the champions of outrage based on hypocrisy. n n
Our new visitors are not representative of trends, except to illustrate the ideological odds and ends currently filling out Occupy Wall Street website designs produced by Obama kinder. But they do remind us that on a national level the silence of the GOP Presidential candidate, by no means fated or inevitable, has enabled the stonewall erected around the President's Chief Executive ideological fantasies pre-Benghazi, dysfunctional freeze during, and out-right moronic and prevaricating defense of the Prophet's honor afterwards. n nIn the course of the campaign Romney tried out: a) a press-release, perhaps supplemented by tweets, then b) a press conference, then, retreating before MSM barrages c) some general thematics about "a MIddle Eastern policy in flames", before d) being flummoxed by Obama's wise-assed diversion in Debate #2 and, who knew? the moderator's failure to decisively rescue him from his red-faced brain-freeze before Presidential chutzpah. n nAfter that, there were a few half-hearted rejoinders from Ryan and then finally a re-enactment of Mark Twain's adage: "The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either. " n nSo, having decided that this whole Benghazi thing was a toxic distraction from his marketing 5-Points-to-Recovery campaign to Tuesday electoral destiny, it's been no hot stove lids and no cold stoves either for the Governor, not in Debate #3 and not afterwards. A reminder, Debate #3 was supposedly about foreign affairs at which a GOP Presidential candidate, might, who knows, just winging it here, connect a few dots from the President's personality and convictions and management style to the, well, literal foreign policy in flames in Benghazi. n nBut no. n nHe has continued to tell us that he stands for a strong national defense but, similarly, in a weird contextless and content-free zone free of any explanation as to why the President may not and why his embassies are set into Al Qaeda militia turf and left to twist in the wind until they are erased by Islamist gunmen characterized as movie critics. n nThe context is left intermittently to surrogates, but mostly to the House of Representatives (explicitly, the GOP candidate for the Presidency of the United States had his executive management committee tell reporters that his involvement in their investigation would be too, um, "political") and Fox News, Commentary, talk-radio, and other interested parties in the blogosphere. n nBut that's out of bounds for the GOP candidate for the Presidency of the United States. But the alternatives can't break through the White House-MSM cocoon of omerta unless that candidate takes point position. n nThis may prove, in terms of pure branding strategy, to have been a brilliant case study for future M.B.A. students, but while high-concept leadership, in campaign-management terms, might be vindicated on November 6, this has not been a profile in Presidential courage.