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What's really behind Obama's Benghazi bunkum

By ANDREW MALCOLMPosted 09/21/2012 08:44 AM ET

You know that act of terrorism in Benghazi last week that saw four Americans killed on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 and the consulate shelled, burned and destroyed and fleeing Americans killed in a nearby safe house that turned out to be unsafe and the Obama administration, alone in the world, said it was all clearly a spontaneous reaction to an old anti-Islam YouTube video?

Remember that? They said it for days. Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador, was sent out as sacrificial lamb on no less than five Sunday shows to peddle the same hooey about spontaneous Muslim anger.

Because if the attack wasn't spontaneous, then it was by definition planned.

And if it was planned, why wasn't Barack Obama, who's skipped so many daily intelligence briefings to campaign for reelection, doing his real job?

Being, oh, say, forewarned and forearmed to protect these valiant Americans serving abroad whom he later lauded as so brave? But they couldn't hear the presidential praise because they were dead far from home. Then, totally tone-deaf to tragedy, Obama dashed off to a Vegas fundraiser.

This administration was too clever by half. On Wednesday, when Obama was up in the Big Apple chatting with Dayyyy-vid Letterman and hobnobbing with Beyonce at $40K per head, the administration sent the director of the National Counterterrorism Center to Capitol Hill. There, Matthew Olsen testified that, yes, the Benghazi attack was an act of terrorism.

Here's the clever part of that. At first it appeared Olsen disagreed with the White House. But the next day Obama press secretary Jay

Carney was able to consult his notes, agree with Olsen and baldly tell reporters: "It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack."

Wait! What?! Now, it's obvious and self-evident? After a week proclaiming clearly it was an organic video outrage? A week, by the way, spent by distracted media members castigating Gov. Romney for so hastily -- and now, so self-evidently -- criticizing the Obama responses. These guys don't have the, uh, balloons to admit a bungle.

(And get this: Thursday the Obama administration spent $70,000 for ads on seven Pakistani TV networks showing the Democrat explaining the U.S. had nothing to do with the anti-Islam video, thus exposing millions more to the hated video.)

Here's the strategic political context of the Carney maneuver: In a close-fought election campaign like this one the last thing an incumbent (or his mouthpiece) wants to do is say, well, yes, as a matter of fact, we blew it. We were wrong. We weren't properly prepared and then afterward, we were in full CYA mode and thought you'd fall for the video line. 


An incumbent president's strong suit always is foreign affairs and national security. He's supposed to know all kinds of secret stuff that we don't, which is OK because it's to keep us and our people safe, right? Except sadly not Amb. Chris Stevens and his colleagues because someone(s) were asleep at the switch. Who would ever anticipate violence against Americans in a lawless Muslim country jam-packed with weapons on 9/11?

Obama's poll approval on handling foreign affairs has exceeded Romney's, as expected for an incumbent. But, actually, it's not all that great. Less than half of Americans (49%) now approve of Obama's foreign affairs job performance, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC Poll.

While nearly as many (46%) disapprove.

Obama's foreign policy approval has plunged five points (or 10%) from 54% just in recent days. Americans may be inattentive much of the time, but they are not dumb. Further unraveling of Obama's cockamamie Benghazi claim and cover-up with additional evidence of mishandling the lead-in seriously jeopardizes his reelection chances.

If all Obama can claim is he let the SEALs kill Osama bin Laden while he watched and his vaunted Muslim outreach got slapped away. Iran got the bomb anyway. Qaddafi and Mubarak are gone. But al Qaeda is moving into the Libya, Syria and Egyptian power vacuums to help ensure the Arab Spring becomes a democracy-free Arab Winter.

So, there goes the president's foreign policy standing. And he's sure got no economic accomplishments to vaunt, even with a teleprompter.

Already, the Journal reports from Libya that for months hopeful Americans ignored numerous warnings of trouble in that lawless land from government and militia sources and followed shoddy security procedures. The Brits had already pulled out of Benghazi. For days the State Dept. didn't even know what its admired ambassador was doing in Benghazi.

After a classified Thursday briefing from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Susan Collins said security in Libya was "woefully
inadequate, given the security threat environment." Rep. Buck McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, added,
"The story now has been changed. There was a planned, premeditated attack."

The State Dept. is launching an Accountability Review Board to investigate. What do you bet its findings and the FBI's will be unavailable before Nov. 6?

The Obama crowd regularly seeks to reap credit for its boss by, for instance, leaking details of the Bin Laden hit and counter-espionage operations, even when they're actually British or Saudi. Now, some apparently are seeking to discredit the ambassador's dead security team, who were former SEALs and not armed with the mortars and rocket-propelled grenade launchers that the spontaneously attacking video-protesters spontaneously produced.

SEALs are well-known as seriously tough dudes. They are beyond bodyguards. They don't get to play much golf. But here's the sort of thing they do get to do:

Leap from airplanes over one country just after midnight at 40,000 feet, wearing oxygen masks and 120-pound packs. Using GPS screens on their chest, they silently steer their chutes a couple dozen miles into an adjacent country, land in the planned field and accomplish their mission.

By dawn that day or maybe several later, if all goes well, they're hiking back out eating lizards and leaves and back at home base watching an NFL game via satellite on AFN.

On an ideal SEAL mission, no one ever knows they were there and their weapons go unused. "If I'm firing this a lot," one SEAL told me last summer, tapping the M-16 clipped to his full gear and body armor, "then I'm having a very bad day."

Those four lost Americans had a very bad day on 9/11. Maybe 11/6 will be a bad day politically for those responsible.