Ambassador Stevens Being Dragged Through The Streets In Libya
According to a new report, the White House was notified the attack on the United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya was most likely terrorism two hours after the start of the assault on the compound. An email has surfaced stating the extremist Islamist group, Ansar al-Sharia, claimed responsibility for the attack in posts on Facebook and Twitter, and the group urged their supporters to attack the US Embassy in Tripoli, Libya.
The new information is contained in a stunning unclassified email obtained by the Associated Press , CBS , CNN , and other news organizations. The email was released by two United States government officials who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the emails publicly.
The email was sent at 6:07 pm on September 11, 2012 by a person using an @state.gov email address. Although the name of the sender and the recipients have been redacted, the email was sent to the @nss.eop.gov email address as well as the State Department and the FBI. “EOP” stands for “Executive Office of the President.”
The subject line is “Update 2: Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack (SBU)” and the text of the email reads “(SBU) Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli.” The Islamist group was also heard bragging about the attack to members of al-Qaeda on phone calls intercepted by US intelligence.
White House press secretary Jay Carney acknowledged the existence of the email but claimed it was part of a flood of information received during the attack. Carney said, “There were emails about all sorts of information that was becoming available in the aftermath of the attack. The whole point of an intelligence community and what they do is to assess strands of information and make judgments about what happened and who is responsible.”
The assault on the Consulate in Benghazi resulted in the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Communications Specialist Sean Smith, former Navy Seal Tyrone Woods, and former Navy Seal Glen Doherty. Sadly, a terrible tragedy is now an appalling game of political football, with Team Romney trying to convince voters that Obama’s handling of the crisis was horribly incompetent or unforgivably dishonest. President Obama is in damage control mode, and he has turned loose his surrogates to accuse Governor Romney of playing politics with the murder of American diplomats.
Supporters of Governor Romney believe President Obama deliberately mislead the American people by blaming an anti-Islamic movie trailer shown on YouTube for the violent unrest in the Arab world. They expressed outrage that Obama acknowledged the deceptively titled Innocence of the Muslim video six times during his UN address and claimed the President was almost apologetic about not being able to censor it because of the First Amendment.
Republicans were particularly incensed by Obama’s UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, who made a tour of the Sunday news shows during which she repeatedly implicated the YouTube trailer in Christopher Stevens death. Two weeks after the attack, Ms. Rice was still bringing up the video to the media. Her colleague in the Obama Administration, Press Secretary Jay Carney, spent the first crucial week after the attack avoiding any discussion of terrorists.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also did her part, constantly citing Innocence of the Muslim in the early days after the attack, even condemning the video as she stood over the caskets of the four fallen Americans:
“To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage. But as I said yesterday there is no justification, none at all, for responding to this video with violence. The U.S. government had absolutely nothing to do with this video and absolutely rejects it content and message. The U.S. has a long tradition of free expression and we do not stop individual citizens from expressing their views, no matter how distasteful they may be.”
President Obama and Vice President Biden deny there was any effort by the White House to cover-up the truth about the events of September 11, 2012. They have attempted to convince the voters that Romney and Ryan are taking advantage of the Libyan debacle to make political points. Obama insists he mentioned terrorism in his Rose garden speech the day after the attack, and he is only allowing his administration time to gather all the relevant facts before making any definitive statement to the American people.
During the second Presidential debate, Mr. Obama was indignant over the implication that he misled the American people:
“The suggestion that anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive … That’s not what I do as president. That’s not what I do as commander-in-chief.”
While the facts remain murky and the truth has yet to be laid bare, many terrorism experts and Obama critics believe the President overplayed his hand by constantly boasting about the killing of Osama Bin Ladin. Between Joe Biden loudly trumpeting “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive” from the podium at the Democratic Convention and President Obama proclaiming to the world that al-Qaeda is finished, it has been suggested the White House further alienated the Muslim world.
The enraged demonstrators who overran and ransacked the United States Embassy in Cairo, just hours before the Benghazi Consulate was attacked, were heard to shout over and over: ” Hey Obama, We Are All Osama. Hey Obama, We Are All Osama. Hey Obama, We Are All Osama. ”
Perhaps, when it comes to dealing with America’s foreign enemies, Teddy Roosevelt said it best: “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”