Today I had a heated conversation with a friend who claimed that there is nothing to the investigation into what happened in Benghazi. My friend claimed (1) Obama had called the attack terrorism in a speech the day after it happened and (2) no one really knew what had happened and who had done it, so it would have been premature to have called it terrorism. 

Ok, it’s obvious that (1) and (2) conflict with each other, since if (1) is true then (2) would mean that (1) was unsubstantiated, and if (2) is true then (1) means the President lied.

But more to the point, here are the facts. 

On September 12, 2012, the day after the Benghazi attack, Obama did give a speech in the Rose Garden where he mourned the loss of the 4 Americans in Benghazi. Yet he never said that the attacks were terrorism. Here is what he said:

We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.  But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. 

He clearly is connecting the video that some Muslims claimed to be offensive with the murder of the 4 Americans.  

He then went on to talk about the significance of September 11 to Americans and THAT is when he used the word “terror”, in reference to September 11, 2001 and other terror attacks on the US. He was very clear in connecting the video to Benghazi but there was never a statement that Benghazi was a terrorist attack.

But one would think that if Obama did indeed refer to the Benghazi attack as a terrorist attack on September 12, 2012, he would have continued to refer to it as such in subsequent days.

In reality, he continued to refer to the Benghazi attack as a response to the allegedly anti-Muslim video. On September 25, nearly two weeks after the attack, and after representatives from his administration had been going on the media day after day insisting that the attacks were a response to the video and not acts of terror, Obama went to the United Nations to give a speech about the Americans who were killed in Benghazi. The speech is here. 

How many times does he refer to terror?  Once, when mentioning that Iran has been sponsoring terrorism in Syria and elsewhere.

How many times does he refer to the allegedly anti-Muslim video? SEVEN. And they are all in the context of connecting the video to the attack on the Benghazi facility.

So, dear friends, if Obama really did call the Benghazi attack a terror attack on the day after it happened, why did he go to the UN two weeks later to blame the video?

And more important, why did order the imprisonment of the maker of that video, a person living in California? And why is that person STILL in jail today?

WHY IT MATTERS

This is the important part. 

It’s clear that Obama was in a close race for re-election at the time of the Benghazi attack. He started his presidency with his infamous apology tour in Cairo, Egypt, and went on to bend over backwards to appease the Muslim world, which had purportedly been angered over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which they thought were western attacks on Islam.

Obama’s goal was to reverse the Bush legacy, and that meant he sought to appease the Muslim world and show them that unlike Bush, he would give great respect to Muslim nations.

As part of that, Obama didn’t want to have overt and militaristic security arrangements in Libya, where Islamist forces had just murdered the Libyan leader and taken control of the country. So the Benghazi facility was left without adequate security.

Obama also was less than a month away from his first debate with Mitt Romney. The economy was still in shambles at that point and Obama had nothing to run on other than the fact that Osama bin Laden had been killed under his watch. The talking point going into the debates was “Obama got Osama” and “al Qaeda is decimated”. Clearly, the intent was to portray Obama as having neutered al Qaeda by, in part, having “got” bin Laden.

If it came out that not only was al Qaeda not decimated but also fully functional and capable of attacking US facilities abroad and murdering US diplomatic personnel, Obama would lose his strong suit (of having taken out al Qaeda).

Don’t believe me? Here’s what Obama said in the October 22, 2012 debate with Romney: “Al Qaeda’s core leadership has been decimated.”

Obama felt he had to hide the fact that (1) al Qaeda was still operational and a real threat to the United States and (2) he had put American lives at risk through his program of appeasing Muslim constituencies. 

In recent Congressional hearings, the Deputy Chief of Mission to Benghazi, the highest ranking survivor of the 9/11/12 attack, stated that he had been in contact with the Obama administration throughout the attack and clearly communicated that they were under attack, it was an organized military attack with mortars and not a spontaneous riot and that the State Department had refused his request to send military assistance during the attack. He went so far as to say that there were no protests against any video in Benghazi and that the video had absolutely no connection whatsoever to the attacks.

YET, the Obama administration insisted that the attacks were random, unplanned responses to an offensive video and utterly rejected any claim that it was an al Qaeda terror attack. Until after the election, of course.

There you have it.